ETTEN-LEUR, Netherlands: When ninth-generation Dutch farmer Jaap Korteweg turned vegetarian and set up a shop selling meat-free products over a decade ago, his friends thought he was joking.
But the founder of “The Vegetarian Butcher” had the last laugh when the company was gobbled up by British-Dutch consumer giant Unilever in 2018.
Unilever has now put the firm at the heart of its plans to carve out a one-billion-euro ($1.2-billion) a year slice of the increasingly juicy global market for meat-free products.
“It’s a dream that comes true for me,” Korteweg said at the site of a grass-roofed, eco-friendly house he has built on former farmland that has been returned to nature.
“I’m a ninth-generation farmer, grew up on the countryside of the Netherlands, between the bulls and the cows for milk,” he adds.
“So it’s not logical maybe that I did it this way for the Vegetarian Butcher. But what I now see is that my family and my brother and sisters are very positive about this transformation and the new business.”
Once a self-confessed “big meat lover”, Korteweg says his conversion came 20 years ago, when he was asked to store dead pigs in his cold storage areas during a swine fever outbreak.
“For me, that was the moment to stop it, I’d had enough of that system using animals for meat,” he said — although giving up eating meat was “not easy” and “like stopping smoking or drugs”.
Korteweg then created a small “butcher’s shop” in The Hague using expert chefs to come up with vegan and vegetarian alternatives to bacon, meatballs, mince, kebabs and other meat products.
“My goal was to become the biggest butcher in the world as soon as possible, and at that time people laughed at it because they don’t take it seriously,” he said.
“But for me I took it seriously because I wanted to create an alternative for industrial meat.” The company expanded and its profile rose, producing a range of quirkily-named vegan products for sale in supermarkets, including “Little Willies” sausages, which made headlines in Britain for their risque name. — AFP
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