This vegetarian butcher shop sells fresh steaks and chicken - but it doesn't slaughter any animals
- The first of its kind in the world, The Vegetarian Butcher only produces vegetarian "meats".
- The company distributes its products, designed to mimic the taste of real meat, in 16 countries.
- The Vegetarian Butcher has recently come under fire from the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) for allegedly "misleading products."
Walk downtown in The Hague, Netherlands, and you'll find a tiny butcher shop with a giant glass window and wooden front. Inside, a metal meat grinder clamps onto a white marble worktop. A selection of fresh steaks, chicken, smoked bacon, and mackerel chill inside the front counter. It looks like a retro-style butcher shop - with one major difference.
The butchers only produce vegetarian meats.
The first of its kind, the shop is fittingly called The Vegetarian Butcher. Since the shop was founded in 2010, the demand for its products has grown tremendously. The shop now sells its vegetarian meats to more than 3,000 stores in 16 countries.
"Our goal is to be the biggest butcher in the world," Niko Koffeman, the cofounder of The Vegetarian Butcher, told Business Insider. "I think we can accomplish that in 20 years."
In 2016, Koffeman and co-founder Jaap Korteweg built a larger production plant in Breda, a city in the southern Netherlands. At the new plant, customers can take cooking classes and learn how the meats are made.
The butchers make most of the meats from organic soy, peas, leek, and lupine, a type of flowering legume (the rest contain a small amount of egg and whey). To mimic the flavor of tuna, they use seaweed, since tuna normally eat other fishes that eat seaweed, Koffeman said. They are working to make all of their products 100% plant-based.
The process is simple. The "butchers" mix the plants with flour and water into metal machines that look similar to pasta makers. Koffeman said they use different machines for each type of meat, whether it's pork, beef, or fish.
Koffeman and Korteweg hope their shop will encourage more people to eat vegetarian meat alternatives.
Worldwide, animal farming has been shown to emit 18% of human-caused greenhouse gases and play a role in climate change. On a global scale, plant-based meats could be a sustainable solution to traditional meat production, which is projected to double by 2050.
"You can't distinguish our meat from regular meat," Koffeman said. "It actually might be better."
The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) may agree. In October, the NVWA ordered The Vegetarian Butcher to change the name of most of its products, including "chicken chunks" and "fish-free tuna," which the NVWA calls "misleading," according to Food Navigator. Unless the company changes its labels by March 2018, it will face a fine.
In 2012, the NVWA also mandated that The Vegetarian Butcher wasn't allowed to call its products "minced meat." The team recently tried to get around the rule by partnering with the consumer goods company Unilever, and trademarking the product name "hacked minced meatballs."
"We were summoned by the NVWA to change the names of almost all our products, just because they got one complaint from a consumer who says our product names misled him," Koffeman told Food Navigator. "There are so many vegetarian products on the market that call themselves 'sausage,' 'schnitzel,' or 'chicken chunks.' We cannot believe a judge would agree with these double standards."