When people read about meat in the media today, it is mostly for negative reasons. For example, the scandal surrounding the insolvent sausage manufacturer Wilke. The North Hessian company had sold meat contaminated with listeria and is therefore believed to be responsible for three deaths and 37 illnesses. The public prosecutor's office in Kassel is investigating, among other things, negligent killing against the former managing director of the sausage manufacturer.
Wilke is not an isolated case. Whether it is ready-made meatballs contaminated with bacteria, cockroaches in the sausage factory or the African swine fever from which the tabloid media write that it is "40 kilometers from the German border": meat and sausages are just not a well-being topic.
This is a problem for many people in Versmold, a center of the meat and sausage industry for more than 100 years. What do you think about it? And do you want to continue to be known as the "grease stain of Germany"?
The farmer: back to the roots
Florian Gontek / DER SPIEGEL
Joachim Klack with Wagyu cattle: "I could stop it tomorrow"
Joachim Klack is chairman of the local agricultural association, most recently he campaigned against the federal government's agricultural package. He has been running his farm for 35 years, he has 60 cows and 150 pigs, two Wagyu cattle.
15 years ago, Klack still had more than 300 pigs. In the meantime, lower prices and stricter hygiene guidelines have made this form of agriculture less profitable. Klack has since written off his pigsties. "I could stop doing it tomorrow," says the 60-year-old.
How should things go for farmers like clack? He believes that a "contract with society" will make it easier for everyone who is part of the meat market: animals, farmers, butchers, consumers.
"Maybe I'm naive too, but I believe in it," he says. There has never been any regional cooperation between the meat industry and local farmers in Versmold, says Klack.
The sausage manufacturer: Always bigger, ever further
The meat industry - it is represented by people like Hans-Ewald Reinert. His company is only a ten-minute drive from Joachim Klacks Hof, but it's a different world. The 56-year-old Reinert runs his family business in the third generation. Founded in the Loxten district of Versmold in 1931, the company had sales of 325 million euros in the past financial year and employs around 1200 people.
Reinert
Company boss Hans-Ewald Reinert: "Worse than the BSE crisis"
Reinert organizes a tennis tournament in Versmold. He is the largest sausage producer in a city that also houses companies like the meat processors Wiltmann and Nölke, which produce the Gutfried poultry brand. There is also a kebab producer. The main thing is meat.
"What we are currently experiencing from the effects of swine fever in China is worse than the BSE crisis 20 years ago," says Reinert. "Raw material prices are exploding and trade is blocking the necessary price increases."
It has just become known that the Cartel Office approved the merger of Reinert's private butchery with the previous competitor Kemper at the turn of the year. The entire company then operates under the name The Family Butchers (TFB) - in German: the family butchers.
The second largest manufacturer of meat and sausage products in Germany is to be created in this way - with 2600 employees and nine production sites. Up to ten percent of the workforce could lose their jobs as a result of the merger.
Hardly any family-owned businesses
After the merger, TFB's market share will be between 10 and 20 percent. The market leader in many areas is Tönnies Holding, which has its own large slaughterhouses. Tönnies is headquartered in Rheda-Wiedenbrück, also East Westphalia, 30 kilometers from Versmold. The Tönnies Group generated sales of 6.65 billion euros in 2018. According to SPIEGEL information, the group is also the main prospect for the takeover of Wilke. After the merger, TFB has annual sales of around EUR 700 million - just over a tenth of its competitor.
"You have to get into a position where you can design," says Reinert about the merger.
The Mayor: Save the city's reputation
Michael Meyer-Hermann, 36, also wants to shape. The CDU politician is Versmold's mayor. Versmold is dependent on the trade tax of the city's meat processing companies. 80 percent of the people who work at Reinert's headquarters live in Versmold or in the immediate vicinity.
Florian Gontek / DER SPIEGEL
Mayor Michael Meyer-Hermann: "Meanwhile very industrial shaped"
The structure of the city is shaped by the balance of power in the meat industry: there is a broad working class and a high density of millionaires - but hardly anything in between. Many people who came here as guest workers from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Yugoslavia in the 1960s were initially hardly integrated.
The reality and image of the meat industry are not always identical. In the heart of the city, the sausage carrier fountain (also called "pig fountain") has stood as a landmark since 1986. But today people in Versmold are looking for sausage carriers as well as smaller butchers in family hands. There is only one outside the city center.
Traditions such as the small meat trade, which gave the city its own identity, especially during the Great Depression 90 years ago, and brought cheap meat leftovers to the people, have largely disappeared. "That's right, we are now very industrial," admits Meyer-Hermann. "You might expect something different from a meat city."
more on the subject
How can the identity as a meat city be combined with the demands of today's consumers? "With transparency," says Hans-Ewald Reinert. "A matter of the heart" is the name of a new product line of his company: pork from rearing free of antibiotics. Above all, that should appeal to an urban, critical, young group of buyers, he says. So less the typical Versmolder. The next step is plastic-free packaging.
"We want to stand with the heart of the conscious flexitarian next to vegan and veggie," he says. In 2015 Reinert participated in the Lower Saxony start-up "Like Meat" and quickly retired. Now you go through meat from antibiotic-free breeding. The meat comes from Denmark from "Danish Crown", the world's largest exporter of pork and Europe's largest pork producer.
That doesn't necessarily sound like the holistic meat region that Bauer Klack conjures up. Even if Reinert emphasizes that he is currently in talks with local farmers in order to be able to source his pork halves regionally.
In August last year the "Haller Kreisblatt" brought Reinert and Klack to a table. Both fought over antibiotic-free rearing of pigs: New products such as "a matter of the heart" put the farmers not involved under general suspicion. Avoid antibiotics completely? But small farmers could not afford that.
"The beginning has been made," Klack had said at the end of the conversation. Since then, the two have heard nothing from each other.
