Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth (30 July 1930 – 15 February 2020) was a German entrepreneur, founder of the Schweisfurth Foundation and pioneer in the ecological production of food. He was the son of
Karl Schweisfurth, who founded
Herta Foods
Herta is a brand of pre-cooked Frankfurters, owned by Nestlé (40%) and Catalan-based Casa Tarradellas (60%). It is currently the most popular Frankfurter-brand throughout Europe.
History
Ludwig Schweisfurth opened a butcher shop in the Ge ...
in 1902.
Biography
Schweisfurth was born and died in
Herten. He interned at industrial scale slaughter houses in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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and used his experiences to implement similar industrial food processing in his father's company. This allowed Herta Foods to develop from a small business to Europe's largest meat processing company, processing 25.000 pigs and 5.000 cattle on a weekly basis.
After it became evident that neither of his sons or his daughter would take over leadership of the company, Schweisfurth sold Herta Foods to
Nestlé
Nestlé S.A. (; ; ) is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since ...
in 1986. Shortly before this, in 1984, Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth had started a new food processing business that would treat animals along the guiding principles of the ecological production of food. This business is called "Herrmannsdorfer Landwerkstätten" and is located in the Bavarian town of
Glonn. For Schweisfurth, his motivation for pioneering ecological farming was that "I suddenly realized that meat from tortured animals cannot be a nurturing source of food for us humans."
Knowing your food's origin
Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth at TEDx Salzburg (German, uploaded on Nov 6, 2010).
References
German businesspeople in retailing
1930 births
2020 deaths
People from Herten
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