Some German sausage manufacturers use health-promoting ingredients to enrich and enhance their products in an effort to improve the quality of the German staple.
Ingredient manufacturers at the IFFA meat fair were offering probiotic or prebiotic products to add to the raw or cooked sausage mix.
Probiotics (for instance,made from milk) are designed to improve the microbial balance in the consumer's intestine.
Prebiotics (made from fruit sugars) pass through the stomach and small intestine undigested, releasing extra nutrient in the colon, and acting as a dietary fibre.
This process is said to have a beneficial effect on the entire body.
Although sausage is seen as a premium food item in Germany, it came under suspicion, like all other types of meat, when the first case of BSE, or mad cow disease, was reported there last year.
Beef consumption plunged the most, with an average fall of 60 per cent. Sales stopped completely at times. Consumer concern extended to items containing meat products, such as desserts and pharmaceutical capsules using gelatine. The fear with manufactured goods such as sausage was that they might include mechanically recovered meat, which could have spine or brain fragments in it.
Consumer confidence has largely been rebuilt. The German Government has banned the use of mechanically recovered meat in manufactured products, and is financing the BSE-testing of all beef animals slaughtered over 24 months old.
Meat consumption is almost back to normal; consumers seem much less concerned about foot and mouth disease. Independent retail butchers have been able to build on the personal relationship they have with customers, and are attracting buyers away from supermarkets.
The German Butchers Association has a number of strategies to encourage the image of the trustworthy supplier. They have made much of the fact that it has never been customary to use mechanically recovered meat in their sausages, and are promoting the use of registers of contents to be on display in shops.
