Germany Produces 17% More Meat Alternatives as Meat Output Keeps Falling

Germany produced 16.6% more meat alternatives in 2023 than the year before, while its meat industry shrank for the seventh year in a row.

The figures come from Destatis, the Federal Statistical Office, which published them today under the headline "Trend zu Fleischersatz ungebrochen" (the trend toward meat substitutes is unbroken). The release opens (translated from German):

Whether veggie burgers, tofu sausages or seitan mortadella, demand for vegetarian or vegan meat substitutes continues to rise. In 2023 companies in Germany produced 16.6% more meat substitute products than in the previous year.

That's around 121,600 tonnes of meat alternatives, up from 104,300 tonnes in 2022. Compared with 2019, production has more than doubled (+113.8%). The value of those products rose by 8.5% to €583.2 million, and the number of companies making them in Germany jumped from 51 to 67 in a single year.

Meanwhile the meat industry is going the other way. As Just Food reported in February, Destatis data show German meat production fell 4% last year to 6.8 million tonnes. It has now fallen every year since its 2016 peak of 8.25 million tonnes.

To keep it real, meat is still the far bigger business. Destatis puts the value of German meat and meat products at €44.8 billion, roughly 77 times the meat alternative figure. But one is shrinking and the other has doubled in five years, and Just Food notes that demand for vegetarian and vegan alternatives "continues to increase". It's not hard to see where the lines cross.

For those of us who lift, there's no downside either. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found plant protein builds muscle just as well as animal protein when total protein is matched, and soy and wheat (the main ingredients in tofu and seitan) are about as protein-dense as food gets. Seitan packs around 25g of protein per 100g. Try saying that about a sausage roll.

This follows last month's news that German meat consumption hit another record low at 51.6kg. We've watched Germany's biggest sausage maker start selling more veggie than meat, Lidl Germany cut its vegan prices to match meat and even the world's largest meat company buy a plant-based brand. And to think we were excited when vegan food sales went up 1,500% in a year back in 2016.

Tofuwurst, anyone? This is just the beginning.