For farmers, the direct marketing of their products is the ideal way and also customers benefit from freshness, variety and lower prices. However, very few farmers have the time and resources to address end customers directly and vice versa. It is particularly difficult with meat – a whole animal is usually too big for a customer.
Grazer Startup Nahgenuss has a solution to this problem: on an online platform, farmers can offer whole animals and several buyers get together. “Crowd Butchering is called that”, explains founder Micha Beiglböck in an interview with Trending Topics.
Sharing a pig with Facebook friends
The idea came to him and his brother Lukas Beiglböck in connection with a farmer: “He is a so-called zoo director: a super farmer, but a bad seller,” says Lukas Beiglböck. With close enjoyment, the brothers want to help farmers. In 2017, the startup won the Green Start competition from the Climate and Energy Fund with this idea (Trending Topics reported).
Cattle, pigs, chickens, lambs, goats or turkeys can be shared with other buyers. If a meat package is still too big, the startup indicates that you could ask Facebook friends: “Sharing is caring”. The farmer specifies a deadline by which the entire animal must be sold for the deal to come about. The meat can then be portioned, vacuum-packed picked up or sent by post.
12 percent revenue share
The platform has grown neatly. More than 100 farmers offer their meat and other complementary products such as potatoes. More than 2,500 customers accept the offer. Nahgenuss takes care of advertising, marketing and networking of the actors. The farmers themselves take care of the shipment of the meat – as a rule, the refrigerated mail order of Austrian Post is used. The startup cuts the retail price by twelve percent, explains Micha Beiglböck the business model. “This year we are aiming for a turnover of 500,000 euros” – double the previous year’s turnover.
Nahgenuss pits Pulse 4 on Tuesday, March 5, at 8:15 pm on the startup show “2 Minutes 2 Million” – on trending topics you’ll find all the startups, investors and deals on the show.
Also published on Medium.