At first glance, the shop looks like a classic butcher’s shop: white tiled walls, a chalk board with the daily specials posted, butcher hooks with sausages hanging on them. In the counter there are bowls with various sausage salads, cold cuts and pickled sauerbraten. A white lettering on the black painted wall reveals that something is different here: “Friends not Food” is written there in capital letters. It is the motto of the “Vegan Meat Shop”, a concept that started as a hobby project and is currently conquering more and more city centers in Germany.
The vegan butcher shop was invented by Nils Steiger together with three friends. He himself has been a vegan since he watched a video about tortured animals with his girlfriend; The managing director is still happy to send out the link to this today. He says he avoids meat out of conviction, not because of the taste: “That’s why I was always looking for something that would bring back Grandma’s sauerbraten.”
They produce this sauerbraten at full speed here, especially in winter. In the two-story production facility at the Großer Garten in Dresden, a former bakery building in the backyard, the upper floor is reserved for Seitan: a wheat protein that, when raw, is reminiscent of flour. A thin film of dust settles over mixers and worktops in the evening – that’s why they separate production from everything made with soy or pea protein.
Judith Voigt is operations manager at the vegan butcher shop. The trained food technologist has set herself the goal of arousing greater interest in plant-based products among non-vegans: “We want to create more openness and gradually bring less animal and more plant-based foods into the refrigerator.”
To make the sauerbraten, first knead the seitan with salt, marjoram, pepper, chopped tomatoes, soy sauce and beetroot juice into a dough in a large mixer. The machine can handle 75 kilograms, which later becomes 150 sauerbraten. A large hook kneads the red-colored dough for ten minutes before it is shaped by hand into one-pound loaves. It smells of herbs and roasted tomato paste – a bit like a restaurant kitchen. “In the summer, one person does it, in the high season in winter there are several of us here,” says Judith Voigt.
It started with vegan schnitzel rolls
The roast pieces are then baked in a convection oven, a type of industrial oven, and later halved and placed in a brine: “This is a classic pickling made from vinegar, water and spices, which softens the structure of the seitan loaf a bit – similar to sauerbraten,” says the food technologist. The vegan roasts stay in the brine for a week, then they are packaged and sold with a classic vegetable jus: in the online shop and in the stationary stores, which are now available in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Augsburg.
They started the vegan butcher shop with four people. When founder Steiger, who actually runs a fitness studio, discovered an empty shop in Dresden together with three friends – two chefs and a business economist – they decided to sell vegan schnitzel rolls there: “We simply said to ourselves: Let’s try it now – if it fails, we can always use the room to play table tennis,” he says.
But they never got around to playing table tennis: When they opened the shop on Bischofsweg for the first time in February 2023, a long queue formed in front of the restaurant: “like in the GDR in front of the butcher,” says Steiger with a wink. After just a few minutes, the 25 rolls were sold out and supplies had to be organized. “That’s when we realized: There was obviously a need here.”
Other manufacturers are also feeling this: whether soy minced meat or burgers made from pea proteins – the market for vegan meat substitutes has been growing rapidly for years: around 121,600 tons were produced in Germany in 2023, 16.6 percent more than in the previous year. If you look at the five-year comparison, production has even doubled. The irony is that large meat producers such as Rügenwalder Mühle, Wiesenhof, Westfleisch and Tönnies in particular make money from vegan substitute products.
On supermarket shelves you can find vegan burger patties, seitan gyros and pea-based sausage. The departments are getting bigger and the products are becoming more sophisticated. Both taste and consistency should be as close as possible to the original animal products. In addition, consumer advocates criticize, many products contain a lot of sugar and salt, thickeners and other additives. If you look at the back of the packaging, the list of ingredients is long and confusing.
The aim is to get ever closer to original tastes
Nils Steiger from the Vegane Fleischerei rejects this criticism: “We have many food technicians who are constantly working on making our products even more authentic.” The company sells 120 products in its stores, and you can also buy everything from roast meat to French cheese in the online shop – all purely plant-based, of course. “We manufacture 75 products ourselves and buy the rest.” It is important that the products do not have a long list of ingredients and are based exclusively on natural spices and flavors. “It is often criticized that vegan products are ultimately artificial – we don’t want that.”
The herb steak, which the vegan butcher shop simply prefixes with a small “no”, consists of seitan, all sorts of spices, preservatives and smoke flavoring. The texture is reminiscent of a classic steak, but with lots of barbecue sauce you could mistake it for one. The grilled sausages and burger patties, on the other hand, are pea-based and are therefore produced on a different production floor in Dresden: “This way we avoid allergens mixing,” says Judith Voigt.
The goal of the vegan butcher shop: to get ever closer to the original tastes and textures – and thus at some point make animal products unnecessary. “Everything that is traditionally bought with bones is still difficult right now,” says Nils Steiger. Chop or leg of lamb, for example. To do this, they experiment primarily with wood in their development laboratory. The fat grain of meat also poses a challenge.
“If we want to remain a manufacturer, we simply have technical limits,” says production manager Voigt. One could try to replace animal proteins and fats with plant-based ones, “but why a deer tastes like deer and a lamb like lamb – that remains a bit unclear and could probably only be recreated with artificial flavors.”
But in addition to innovation, it is also the tradition that the vegan butcher shop follows – and obviously hits a nerve: “What we are already doing with our stores is preserving the shopping feeling,” says Steiger. So children get a slice of meat sausage in their hand – sorry: a slice of “no meat sausage” of course.
There has been a long-standing dispute over the name of the products: first it was the dairy industry that sued against oat, soy and other substitute products. An EU regulation now stipulates that the term “milk” is reserved exclusively for products “from the normal udder secretion of animals such as cows, sheep or goats”.
Things are still different when it comes to vegan meat substitutes: The European Court of Justice recently ruled that plant-based products can also be called “sausage”, “steak” or “schnitzel”; Each EU state now handles this individually. In France, it has been forbidden to call vegan products “ham”, “fillet” or “steak” since 2024.
Nils Steiger is also offended by his butcher shop idea: Shortly after opening the branch in Dresden, he had to rename some of his products. The “Sülze” became “Gesülze”, the “Leberwurst” became “Groben” and the “Tuna” became “Unvisch.” Now they have resorted to prefixing all products with a “No”: “I don’t want to provoke people with this, I just want to make it clear to customers straight away what the product tastes like,” says Steiger. And if someone does get annoyed, it’s not a bad thing: “Friction creates reach.”
