How many veggie sausages and burgers are produced in Germany?
It feels like every week the supermarkets are offering a new veggie burger. But how many meat substitute products are actually produced in Germany?
Image credit: Like Meat
It feels like every week the supermarkets are offering a new veggie burger. But how many meat substitute products are actually produced in Germany?
With the year 2019, the Federal Statistical Office has also arrived in the present: at least one year after the products from “Beyond Meat” were available in Germany, the German statistical authority is also providing data on the production of meat substitute products in Germany. The new figures for 2021 were recently published - reason enough to take a closer look.
The Federal Statistical Office records, among other things, vegetarian spreads, soy patties, tofu or vegetarian sausage. The statistics are still relatively rudimentary and concentrate on production within Germany. However, products that are imported into Germany do not appear in the statistics - this applies, for example, to the aforementioned burgers from “Beyond Meat”, which are produced in the Netherlands, for example.
For the year 2021, the Federal Statistical Office reports a production of almost 100,000 tons of meat substitute products in Germany. This is an increase of 17% compared to the previous year - almost a fifth more. Although this is a decent growth, the pace has slowed down somewhat: from 2019 to 2020, there was a growth of 39%. Over the course of two years, i.e. from 2019 to 2021, the mass of meat substitute products produced in Germany has risen by a whopping 62%.
The value of meat substitute products manufactured in Germany in 2021 is around 450 million euros. This is about 75 million euros more than in the previous year - a growth of 22%. Interestingly, the value is rising slightly faster than the mass produced: this means that the price per kilogram is now slightly higher. Between 2019 and 2020, there had already been a growth of around 100 million euros (+37%). If you compare 2021 with 2019, you can see an increase of 68% in the value of meat substitute products.
However, compared to meat production in Germany, this is still quite low: while the value of meat substitute products was around 450 million euros in 2021, meat and meat products worth around 35.6 billion euros were produced in the same year. In other words: for every €1 of meat substitute produced, around €75-80 of meat is produced at the same time.
On the other hand, meat production in Germany is continuously declining: in 2021, the value fell by almost 8%, which corresponds to a sum of around 3 billion euros. These figures only refer to production in Germany - it is not clear how this will affect consumption in Germany, because we both import and export meat.
Unfortunately, there are no figures on the consumption of meat substitute products in Germany: we do not know how many products we export to other countries and how much we import to eat here. If we assume that all meat substitute products produced in Germany are also eaten here and there are no imports from abroad, then we arrive at per capita expenditure of around €5.50 for meat substitute products in 2021 - that would correspond to about 1.5-2 packs of veggie burgers or schnitzel. However, the figure of €5.50 is extremely imprecise, also because it is actually clear that we import quite a lot.
You can see more details directly from the Federal Statistical Office.