“Logical step”
Rügenwalder Mühle wants to counter meat’s increasingly bad image as an ever more consumers have (partially) moved over to alternative food intake: they want healthier food and a smaller ecological food print. The meat industry uses a huge amount of natural resources.
“Our brand is well-positioned, but the meat industry is not”, CEO Christian Rauffus told German Der Spiegel. “Vegetarian products are merely a logical step to us.” He has even called sausages the cigarette of the future, exactly because of that worsening public image.
The move has already proven to be a success: four of the company’s ten best-selling products are vegetarian products and it expects 30 % of its 2020 turnover to come from vegetarian products. If the current growth is maintained, the company should reach that forecast next year already.
