Discussions are ongoing with Westfleisch regarding cooperation in meat production but not in pig slaughtering.
Danish Crown states that the slaughterhouse in Essen was a costly affair in the past fiscal year with a loss of about 15 million euros. The facility slaughters approximately 64,000 pigs weekly. With a capacity of up to 74,000, it is one of the largest slaughterhouses in Germany with around 1,400 employees.
According to the German trade magazine Lebensmittel Zeitung, the slaughterhouse would come under the ownership of the second largest German slaughterhouse company, Westfleisch. However, Danish Crown expects that access to raw materials (i.e., slaughter pigs) will be an important competitive factor in the coming years.
With the purchase in 2011, Danish Crown gained access to local raw materials on the German market, where it already had several processing plants. Also within a short driving distance from Essen, DC still has three processing plants. At the same time, Germany remains one of DC’s absolute core markets, although it is embroiled in intense competition there.
Danish Crown is still the fourth largest pig slaughterer on the German market. The largest remains Tönnies with 13.99 million slaughters, while Westfleisch slaughtered 6.5 million pigs and Vion 5.3 million. The Dutch company has since chosen to withdraw from Germany and is currently selling its facilities in the country. Tönnies is taking over almost all of Vion’s beef activities in Germany and is thus number one in beef processing, ahead of Westfleisch.
Westfleisch is in talks with Danish Crown about forms of cooperation at their German sites, according to information from Lebensmittel Zeitung (LZ). The German cooperative is reportedly interested in acquiring most DC slaughterhouses. There is also ongoing speculation within the industry about a merger between the two companies by the end of 2025.
Recently, the new DC chief Niels Duedahl announced that he wants to cut about 500 jobs in administration, sales, and service. “Danish Crown is in the middle of a crisis and we are facing radical changes,” he said in mid-October.