Ever sind 1^st September 2000, declarations of origin have had to be made for every piece of beef that is marketed in the EU. All of the participants in the market, i.e. slaughterhouses, cutting plants, wholesalers, food retail chains of dedicated butchers' shops, als well as direct farm sales outlets, are obliged to do this. The legal basis for this is provided by European Regulations Nr. 1760/2000, 1825/2000 and 275/2007 as well as further national regulations.

In order to be able to use declarations concerning beef that go beyond those required by law (e.g. category, breed, housing and feeding standards, regional origins or quality meat programmes), every market participant must register an approved labelling system with the German Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food (BLE) or subcribe to an existing system.

ORGAINVENT is the leading German labelling organisation; its specification was approved as long ago as 1998 - in the times of voluntary beef labelling in accordance with Reg. (EC) 820/ 97. ORGAINVENT does not itself sell meat, but sees istself as a service provider for the meat industry with the task of communicating the requirements fo the European and nationals legal texts and their relevance in practice at the different process stages. ORGAINVENT has already had a multitude of facultative declarations approved by the BLE for its subscribers - both generally and individually.

Statistics: 23.6.2010

Number of subscribing businesses: 299

Theses are distributed among the process stages as follow (multiple reports are possible)

Slaughter:                  67
Cutting:                     160
Wholesale trade:       168
Retail trade:               53 with 12,246 consumer sales outlets
Butchery businesses:  54 with 249 consumer sales outlets