There are people who don't like pork, but really enjoy eating salmon. In some kitchens, the fish on the plate is much more popular than the medallion of pork fillet. But what few people know is that the reddish tone in salmon meat usually comes from the blood of pigs. Hemoglobin powder made from red blood cells is pressed into pellets and fed to salmon in aquaculture.
The pig is everywhere. Its bone meal becomes the raw material for porcelain, heart valves from pigs are used in medicine, gelatine from the collagen of the skin and bones is found in gummy bears as well as in cosmetics or medication capsules. Heparin is obtained from the intestinal mucosa and is used as an ingredient in cream. Many wines are filtered with gelatin, which comes from pigs. And these are just the parts of the pig that you don't immediately think of because they are not eaten as sausages or pieces of meat.
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Virtually all pork is used. Even the intestinal contents become biogas. Without intestines, a pig weighs around 100 kilograms. Of this, 55 kilograms are meat, the rest is rind and bones. Of these 55 kilograms, around 35 kilograms are sold as fresh meat, the remaining 20 kilograms are processed into sausage.
Germans' relationship with their most popular farm animal is complicated. Only certain parts of the animal are eaten in this country; without the feet or heads being exported to Asia, slaughter would hardly be economical. Between the supposedly perfect farm world and the cutlet in the 800 gram pack in the discounter lies a value creation that consumers tend to ignore.
How our society works can be seen in the largest work of the Premium Food Group, the food giant from Rheda-Wiedenbrück, which is probably much better known under the family name Tönnies. The company slaughters 20,000 pigs there every day. Twice as many are hanging on the hooks. It is a work like no other.
It is extremely technological and automated and at the same time still dependent on hard, physical work. Disassembly is labor-intensive and not easy to replace with robots. It's cold in the halls. Blood and disinfectant are not a particularly good combination for technical devices. In the middle of the corona pandemic, in what was probably the company's biggest crisis, Clemens Tönnies invested millions in robots that cut open the stomachs of pigs. The group employs a good 20,000 people, in no other factory as many as in Rheda-Wiedenbrück. Without guest workers, the meat industry would lack skilled workers. Previously it was Italians or Greeks in the region, today it is mainly people from Romania who work early and late shifts at the plant.
The work is designed for efficiency – and demanding
They meet at the “Kamener Kreuz”, where the corridors lead to the various factory areas, where they get their coats, hairnets and chain mail, pick up their sharpened knives and pass through one of the many hygiene locks. Anyone walking through the factory has to constantly wash their hands or wade through rows of brushes with disinfectant in their rubber boots. Some of them earn minimum wage, they spend an entire shift making the same simple cut, stacking packages of minced meat or sorting fillets. Others do complicated maneuvers, remove shoulder cartilage or weigh every second to check. Some people have worked their way up to shift manager.
The person responsible for the operation started on the assembly line in 1992, in dismantling, practically with the opening of the factory in Rheda. He saw how a production line became by far the largest slaughterhouse in the country; today the plant occupies 185,000 square meters. Every third pack of minced meat in Germany comes from the factory.
In the summer of 2020, more than 1,500 employees there were infected with the corona virus in a short period of time. Because it was common practice in the industry at the time to hire workers through subcontractors with work contracts, it was difficult to trace the chain of infection. Politicians complained about Tönnies. The plant remained closed for 30 days as ordered by the authorities. Today the dispute with North Rhine-Westphalia has long been resolved. The state paid 3.2 million euros, which Tönnies passed on to charitable purposes.
The entrepreneur is certainly not the most popular manager in the country, simply because of his brash nature. He has become a rich man with a business that he has professionalized enormously. What began in a parental butcher shop is now a group with an annual turnover of 7.8 billion euros. And although the company also slaughters cattle, operates its own logistics fleet, supplies animal proteins to animal feed companies, is the largest retail supplier ahead of companies like Oetker and has therefore given itself a different name, Premium Food Group, the pig is still the focus today.
Eating habits change
Pigs are omnivores and are similar in structure to humans. They became farm animals in early farming structures, and for good reason: because they were able to use everything that was left over. Potato peels or whey, leftovers from the autumn harvest. The animals grew fat before winter and fed the families through the lean times. Even in the past, everything from the pig was used: the feet ended up in the lentil or pea soup, black pudding was found on the breakfast table and the brawn in the cooking pot.
Today there are far fewer parts on the menu and tastes have changed. Nevertheless, Germans still eat an average of 28.3 kilograms of pork per person per year. This represents a little more than half of all meat consumption, as determined by the Federal Information Center for Agriculture. Poultry is becoming increasingly popular, accounting for almost 15 kilograms. On average, every German ate 9.7 kilograms of beef and veal in 2025.
The most popular is the neck fillet, which is used to make schnitzel. Behind it comes belly meat, which is also processed into bacon. Almost a third of the pork consumed in this country is imported because certain cuts are so popular that the level of self-sufficiency is not sufficient. Ultimately, the consumer who consumes them decides how many pigs are kept in Germany.
The agricultural structure is fragmented in international comparison. On average, the number of sows kept in Germany is around 300 animals, while Danish producers have more than twice as many at 800. In the United States, there are already more than 2,000 sows on medium-sized farms. The animals often give birth to twelve or more piglets per litter, often more than twice a year. When the piglets weigh 25 to 30 kilograms, they end up in the fattening stable. In this country, fatteners keep a little more than 1,000 pigs, the Danes keep five times as many, and in America there are farms with more than twenty times as many pigs.
The blood comes through the pipeline
The animals are delivered in trucks from farmers in the area. It is the place that most closely resembles a stable, it smells of pig, there are grunts and squeaks here and there. They walk in groups to a lock, where the animals are driven down into the depths in a kind of paternoster and anesthetized with CO2. After they are killed and bled, the animals are scalded with hot water to remove bristles and hair. The blood flows via a pipeline to another part of the plant, saving the company 1,000 trucks a year. For hemoglobin powder production, the blood of animals is supplied from other slaughterhouses run by the family business in the east and north of Germany, as well as from three external slaughterhouses in the region. Contract manufacturers take care of the plasma powder, and there are many players in the value chain, just as there are many players in the processing of the intestines into heparin. In Rheda-Wiedenbrück there is still a lot of home-made production, simply because the number of animals is so large that a business area like hemoglobin powder production is worthwhile. What is a penny business adds up to more than 120,000 pigs a week.
A robot cuts open the stomach, with millimeter precision, while another empties the intestines. Then the organs are removed: cut, innards out, knives disinfect at one station, a new knife grabs at the other, three men in a practiced circular movement, the pigs pull past the hooks. Behind them, veterinarians check whether the tails are intact and the animals were healthy. Bitten tails indicate that the pigs in the stable were under stress; companies like the Premium Food Group pay a curly tail bonus.
It is part of the simultaneity that is difficult to process: tens of thousands of animals are killed every day in a place where a lot of thought is given to animal welfare. This starts with the fact that the animals tend to walk uphill in the corridors, it is dark and damp. Stress also affects meat quality. CO2 stunning is controversial, but it is the industry standard and probably the gentlest form: With electric shocks, however, it often happens that some animals are not stunned at all.
The number of pig farmers is decreasing
While 50 million pigs were slaughtered every year in Germany, today the figure is still around 42 million. However, the number of farmers is falling faster than the number of animals: those that are still there are getting bigger. More rules and requirements as well as more animal-friendly housing methods with more space, fresh air and exercise make breeding more demanding. At the same time, prices are under pressure. Pork prices are currently at 1.60 euros per kilogram, which is 20 cents more than in the past few months, but is still a long way from the more than two euros that farmers received for a long time.
The price pressure is linked to African swine fever and foot and mouth disease, which makes it difficult for companies to export to many countries, especially the Asian markets. Spain is already the largest pig producer in Europe and is now selling more products to neighboring countries.
For Tönnies, Germany is the most important sales market. But the slaughter company still needs the export markets. "We have to think about the entire animal. What is rarely on our plate is a highly valued food in other countries," says Maximilian Tönnies, son of the company founder and now also involved in the management. Last week, the Federal Minister of Agriculture Alois Rainer was on site to visit the factory. He is a master butcher by profession. “This makes it clear how closely regional marketing and international trade in pork belong together,” said the CSU politician afterwards.
Production is as highly automated as possible
In production, the situation is ultimately the same for the slaughterhouse as for other industrial companies: Germany is currently suffering from cost disadvantages in international competition. The more efficiently production is structured, the more likely it is to cope with crises such as the persistently low price of pigs or export restrictions in important markets. Machines pack and label products on several production lines next to each other; the portions automatically run along conveyor belts into the cooled warehouse or directly to the pallets that are loaded onto trucks.
The dismantling and cutting takes place in two shifts, but the trucks come practically around the clock. Sometimes there are also economies of scale that the East Westphalian meat company can exploit. This is evident, for example, in the tail, which is often removed in Asia, but only if it is intact. Due to the size of the pigs, it is worth positioning an employee with a hand saw in the chain behind the robot that saws the animal in half to cut the last five centimeters so that the tail is not split.
Or later, in the dissection in the shoulder cartilage: It weighs between 30 and 50 grams. Removing this is challenging; it requires specially trained personnel who can do it in the time in which the pig parts pass the assembly line. If a medium-sized company slaughters 1,000 pigs a day, they would get one pallet of this part. Anyone who slaughters 20,000 pigs a day can ship an entire container to Korea. Because the cartilage, which is cooked as small cubes in broths and stocks for a long time and refines soups, is considered a delicacy, the company receives around two euros per piece. What wouldn't be worthwhile for a small company makes sense in Tönnies' industrial logic.
