Danish meat group Danish Crown has reiterated that it has no intention of selling its large slaughterhouse in Essen, Germany. The group says it will maintain the loss-making operation and denies rumours that a sale to Westfleisch is imminent.
Discussions are underway with Westfleisch about cooperation in meat production, but not in pig slaughter.
Danish Crown says the Essen slaughterhouse was an expensive operation in the past financial year, with losses of around 15 million euros. The site slaughters around 64,000 pigs a week. With a capacity of up to 74,000, it is one of Germany's largest slaughterhouses, with around 1,400 employees.
According to the German trade magazine Lebensmittel Zeitung, the slaughterhouse would be owned by the second largest German slaughterhouse company Westfleisch. But Danish Crown expects that access to raw materials (read: slaughter pigs) will become an important competitive parameter 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. DC still has three processing plants within a short drive of Essen. At the same time, Germany is still one of DC's absolute core markets, although it is involved in fierce competition.
Danish Crown is still the fourth largest pig slaughterhouse on the German market. The largest is still Tönnies with 13.99 million slaughters, while Westfleisch slaughtered 6.5 million pigs, and Vion 5.3 million. The Dutch group 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 therefore the number one in beef, ahead of Westfleisch.
Westfleisch is in talks with Danish Crown about forms of cooperation in their German locations, according to information from the Lebensmittel Zeitung ( LZ ). The German cooperative is said to be interested in taking over most of the DC slaughterhouses. There is also still speculation in the industry about a merger between the two companies at the end of 2025.
Recently, new DC boss Niels Duedahl announced that he wants to cut around 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.