Butcher fights against the zeitgeist and the bad reputation of meat

With pictures by Lisa-Marie Yeschina.

There is a loud babble of voices in the butcher’s shop. Salami and Knacker dangle next to tea and Mettwurst sausages on silver hooks from the wall. The offers of the week flicker on oversized digital screens and a black chalkboard praises the mixed hack: 100 grams are now available for 8.95 euros.

Saleswomen in red vests scurry back and forth behind the glass counter, which is a good five meters long. Dirk Ludwig, the boss, is standing at the edge of the display.

Strong build, short hair, high collar, rolled up sleeves – Ludwig looks like a master butcher from a picture book. And in a way he is: the 49-year-old is the fourth generation to run the family business “Der Ludwig” and is a master of his craft. He is regarded as Germany’s “meat pope” or “steak pope”.

When a woman in her 60s with perfectly set, graying hair enters the store, he raises his hand. “Hello Ms. Müller, nice to see you,” he says. “Hello Mr. Ludwig,” she replies and laughs as she takes small steps to join a line of ten customers who are all waiting to be served.

The clock above the counter reads half past twelve. At lunchtime the store is full. Business is booming. Not a matter of course in Germany.

Butchers are currently in a difficult position

Butchers are having a difficult time at the moment. Sausages and meat, once national favorites and almost a must on every plate, are losing acceptance. In 2022, every German consumed an average of 52 kilos of meat, around 12 kilos less than 30 years ago. On the other hand, the number of people who eat vegetarian or vegan food is increasing.

Eating meat does not correspond to the current zeitgeist, it is considered harmful to the climate and unhealthy. Anyone who confesses to the neck steak makes himself morally vulnerable. In addition, the butcher industry suffers from the numerous slaughterhouse and rotten meat scandals in large companies. As everywhere, there is a lack of skilled workers and young people.

The consequences can be seen in almost every city: More and more butcher shops are closing. In 2006 there were still more than 17,000 independent butcher’s workshops in Germany. In 2021, 15 years later, there were only around 11,000. More than every third company has closed.

Dirk Ludwig perseveres. 17 years ago, he took over the business “Der Ludwig” in Schluechtern, a town with 17,000 inhabitants in south-eastern Hesse, from his father. Before that, his grandfather and great-grandfather were at the helm. The company’s success is largely related to the attitude of the boss, to his philosophy.

Transparency is an important keyword for Ludwig

Dirk Ludwig deliberately wants to distance himself from the factory bunkers of the large slaughterhouses, which are fenced off with barbed wire and where animals are fattened to slaughter weight in a hurry – with partly questionable, sometimes also criminal methods. The factories look like fortresses, and what exactly goes on behind the facades remains hidden from the public.

Dirk Ludwig takes a different approach. He creates transparency, he seeks proximity to the customer. For example on social media, where he gives insights into his everyday life as a master butcher via his Instagram account “der_ludwig”. Around 9,000 people follow him, for example when he visits the best and most famous butchers in the world and talks shop with his colleagues.

His customers can also gain an insight into his working methods directly on site. 15 years ago, when there was a scandal about glue in ham, Ludwig had the idea of ​​adding a “transparency room” to his butcher’s shop. A tubular extension with a large window facing the street, without any frosted glass.

From outside, passers-by can look into the cauldrons of the sausage kitchen and see how the butchers shrink-wrap the meat in transparent cling bags. The message behind it is clear: enjoy watching our work, we have nothing to hide here.

“Many people have completely lost touch with food and meat production,” says Dirk Ludwig. He wants to restore this connection.

Always new products for his customers

Hamburgers are also made in the open sausage kitchen today. A young, wiry trainee butcher with blond hair shovels a total of 100 kilos of minced meat in small batches into a whirring machine with a cylindrical funnel. A few seconds later, the pressed, flattened patties fall onto a light blue ribbon. From there, the apprentice intercepts the raw meat and accurately places the burger patties in a brown box that sits on a trolley.

“In the past ten years, our craft has turned a lot in the direction of grilling, barbecue, burgers,” says Dirk Ludwig and pauses for a moment. “We found our way into this niche.”

Ludwig’s great passion is the maturing process of high-quality beef and ox meat. Once he tried to let the meat mature in a slimy and tough gummy bear mass, he says. The result was awful. He laughs. Sometimes his creations are even meatless. Just like the vegetable skewer for the grill, which employees with white caps on their heads are preparing by spearing pieces of red and yellow pepper on a thin wooden stick in the kitchen.

“Handicraft must be perceived as cool again”

Another room is filled with a sweet smell. Eight butchers cut up beef, pork and veal there on this Thursday morning, four are standing around a table made of metal and brown-red wood. It’s just a pig’s turn.

“And how is the marbling?” Ludwig asks a woman to his right, who is separating the pink flesh from the bones with a knife as long as her forearm. Lara Schneider has hidden her brown hair under a cap. She wears the oversized, white and slightly greasy apron over a black shirt. “Good, you can work with it,” she replies and laughs.

Hardly anyone wants to be a butcher anymore. It was different with Lara Schneider. She is 24 years old and made a conscious decision to pursue this profession. “The handicraft simply has to be perceived as cool again,” she says.

Animal welfare and quality are the focus

This is exactly what Dirk Ludwig is working on. His job is all about trust, he says. Animal welfare is important in this context, but so is the quality of its meat. Because that is exactly what many consumers would miss at many discounters and supermarkets. That’s why he relies a lot on local cooperation with farmers and is one of the few smaller butchers who still butchers himself.

But it is precisely here that obstacles are increasingly being placed in his way. The difficult situation for the butcher trade in Germany in general slows him down too.

Dirk Ludwig stands in the dark behind a brown swinging door with the large submarine windows. Nevertheless, the white tiles and the metal poles on the ceiling of the slaughter room can be seen. Around 100 hooks hang on the wall here and yellow plastic crates lie upside down on a silver shelf.

Until recently, a pig truck from the neighboring town, which is only ten kilometers away, stopped twice a week in front of the double doors of the 40 square meter room. The pigs are stunned, slaughtered, gutted and split in small groups with electric tongs.

“The fewer butcher shops there are, the more infrastructure is lost”

But recently Ludwig received an email from the veterinary office. Since then he has only been allowed to slaughter on Mondays. This is symbolic of the gradual end of his craft, says Ludwig, pushing his hands into his front pockets. It’s a vicious circle for him. “The fewer butcher shops there are, the more infrastructure is lost.”

For the veterinary service, he explains, it’s simply no longer worthwhile hiring enough people to take samples from the butchers in the region over two days. There are already too few for that. “And the less infrastructure there is, the more butcher shops close and fewer smaller businesses can slaughter. This reduces freshness and quality. There are fewer customers and more butcher shops have to give up.”

The more serious the subject becomes, the more Ludwig frowns and narrows his eyes. He is concerned that one day he will no longer be able to slaughter his own meat and will then no longer be able to offer his customers the quality they are used to from him.

Ludwig presses the light switch and the neon tubes flicker briefly, then it’s light. Everything in the room shines as if it had just been cleaned. It’s Thursday. New pigs arrive on Monday. Until then, they just process the meat that is there. Everything is still going well in his calculations.

But in the end, according to Ludwig, like many other butchers in Germany, he too faces the “most difficult entrepreneurial challenge” of his life with his business. But he wants to make it. He wants to prove that smaller, family-run companies with tradition have a future.