Veggie trend in East Germany
Meat substitutes are making inroads into the sausage strongholds
04/18/2022, 09:20 am
The trend towards vegetarian or even vegan nutrition has long largely passed East Germany. But in the meantime, the food trade is also observing high growth rates for soy escalopes and co. in the bratwurst strongholds of the East.
Whether seasoned meat, solyanka or Thuringian bratwurst: a number of meat dishes from the GDR era still have cult status in East Germany today. According to surveys, vegetarian or vegan diets are far less common here than in the West. Soy schnitzel or oat milk are having a harder time. However, retailers in the East are also noticing that the market for vegan or vegetarian substitute products has picked up. The only question is how long the hype will last – also in view of the war.
Across Germany, the growth rates for the veggie market have recently been immense: retailers are reporting double-digit percentage increases in sales for 2021. According to the Federal Statistical Office, the value of the goods produced increased by 37 percent from 2019 to 2020. At around 375 million euros, it was still 100 times lower than the value of all meat products produced in Germany. But is the cautious trend towards veggie sausages still arriving in the East?
“Overall and as a whole, the demand for vegan products in the western part of our sales area is greater than in Saxony and Thuringia,” says Germany’s largest food retailer Edeka, who also refers to similar structures in northern Bavaria. In urban centers in the east, however, demand is picking up.
Rewe also recorded an increase in sales “in the higher double-digit percentage range” in its sales area in eastern Germany for 2021 compared to the previous year. According to figures from the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, in 2021 almost one in three people in western Germany used vegetarian alternatives to animal products more often, compared to one in five in the east. The proportion of vegetarians and vegans was 14 percent in the west and 9 percent in the east.
Meat scandalized in the West
For food culture researcher Gunther Hirschfelder, there are historical reasons for the difference. “From the 1950s onwards, meat was seen in both the FRG and the GDR as a symbol of healthy life, strength and masculinity,” says the professor for comparative cultural studies at the University of Regensburg. In Germany, meat was initially hesitant in the 1970s, but was later increasingly scandalized. In the GDR, on the other hand, the leadership tried to keep meat available despite the shortage economy. “Systems that are under pressure and that have authoritarian traits would do well to let a population have things like meat and alcohol.”
After the fall of communism, the younger, more innovative sections of the population, who had pushed vegetarianism, went west. What was left was an older and more male population with a rather lower income. These factors tended to favor high meat consumption. In addition, regional identity is often more important in the East than in the West because it is more threatened. “And that means that people tend to stand by traditional products.”
Anyone who wants to find out what the veggie trend is like in the East can find what they are looking for in the Thuringian town of Gößnitz, with a population of 3,000, on the border with Saxony. Claudia and Uwe Lahl make something there that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in the bratwurst state: vegan smoked cheese. With their manufactory, they are far away from the retail sales volumes. As a direct marketer, they are all the closer to the customer.
“People have definitely become more tolerant,” says Claudia Lahl. When they started their manufactory in 2017, there was hardly any choice in the supermarkets either. That has changed. In the meantime, people between the ages of 20 and 60 are ordering from them, and they are not being looked at obliquely. But what you notice in rural areas in particular: there are far fewer shops offering vegan or vegetarian products.
Setback foreseeable?
Retailers also report the urban-rural divide. At Edeka, a particularly large number of replacement products are sold in Dresden and Leipzig, as a spokeswoman said. This can also be observed in cities with a high proportion of students, such as Jena.
Food culture researcher Hirschfelder does not believe that the trend towards soy schnitzel will prevail across the board in the East. In the foreseeable future, society will not only feel the economic consequences of the Corona crisis more, but above all the consequences of the war in Ukraine. “We see that overvaluing food is a phenomenon of affluence.” In addition, there is the sustainability debate: Meat substitutes in particular are mostly highly processed foods with long delivery routes. “One can only wait for them to be bashed by the media.”
Hirschfelder also refers to the stock market: the papers of the US producer Beyond Meat had repeatedly disappointed in the recent past and had to accept severe price losses. And the price of the Berlin manufacturer Veganz also fell by around 40 percent at times after the IPO in November.