Engadine venison salsiz: 51 per cent of the meat comes from New Zealand

An Engadine butcher's shop sells a venison sausage marketed as a regional speciality whose meat is 51 per cent from New Zealand.

According to research by «Watson», the import share is so high that the labelling as a «Swiss product» probably does not meet the Swissness requirements of the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (BLV), in the authority's assessment: for processed foods, at least 80 per cent of the weight of the ingredients must come from Switzerland. The BLW had reached the same conclusion in a comparable case involving the «Muotathaler» venison Schüblig from New Zealand. The butcher's shop concerned justifies its reliance on imported goods by saying that domestic game simply does not suffice for the quantities in demand.

This confirms what consumers should have known for years: the romantic image of regional game, fresh from the local mountains, does not stand up to reality. Around two thirds of the game meat sold in Switzerland comes from abroad. The quantities from domestic hobby hunting are far too small to meet demand in autumn. As we documented in our article «Most game meat comes from abroad» the domestic share of the game meat market most recently amounted to just under 38 per cent.

A permanent condition, not an isolated case

The current case is not a slip-up but is part of a long history of mislabelling in Swiss meat processing. The best-known case bears a name that still echoes today: Carna Grischa. The Grisons meat trader from Landquart had for years sold cheap imported meat as Swiss goods, manipulated expiry dates, declared thawed frozen goods as fresh meat and even passed off horse meat as beef. Switzerland's biggest meat scandal was uncovered in 2014 by an internal informant.

The public prosecutor of Grisons established that, from the end of 2009 until July 2013, foreign poultry and beef had been labelled as Swiss produce. Two former managing directors were convicted in 2016 of repeated falsification of goods and given suspended fines and penalties. The company itself did not survive the scandal: Carna Grischa went bankrupt in 2015, and 27 employees lost their jobs.

That this was not a closed chapter became apparent once again in 2025. According to media reports, investigations into the eastern Swiss Carna Centres, a corporate network once linked to Carna Grischa, brought to light the very same patterns: foreign meat sold as Swiss produce, expired products passed off as fresh meat. Former employees independently described how they had been instructed by management to deceive.

Hobby hunting also plays its part

False declaration does not stop at the large trading firms. It reaches right into hobby hunting itself. In the Toggenburg region, a 40-year-old hobby hunter and butcher was convicted by the St. Gallen public prosecutor for having sold imported meat as Swiss meat and declared lamb as local game between 2014 and 2015. We have examined the case in a separate article: «Hobby hunter convicted of meat fraud». Customers were deliberately deceived about the contents and origin, by, of all people, a man who proudly advertised his hunting specialities with the note «from my own hunt».

On top of this comes a structural problem that the industry created itself. Since the revision of the federal ordinance on slaughtering and meat inspection (VSFK), which came into force on 1 May 2017, it is no longer fundamentally an official veterinarian who decides, but rather a so-called «qualified person», whether killed game must be subjected to a meat-hygiene inspection. Anyone who has attended a corresponding course counts as qualified, which in practice usually means the hobby hunter himself. The federal government has thereby handed the assessment over to those who have an economic self-interest in the sale.

Whether it's New Zealand red deer in the «Engadine» sausage, Hungarian poultry sold as Swiss chicken, or lamb passed off as native game: the pattern is always the same. Wherever origin, homeland and naturalness are used as selling points, the highest margins can be extracted. And that is precisely where deception happens most often. The narrative of healthy, regional, organic game is first and foremost a sales tool of the hobby hunting lobby, one that has little to do with the reality on the packaging and on the plate.

Consumers who believe they are buying an honest, controlled alternative with «game» are falling for a marketing legend. We have compiled more on the health risks of game meat in our article «Caution: A warning about game meat from hobby hunters». Anyone who wants to avoid animal suffering, contamination with harmful substances and label fraud all at once has a simpler solution than studying the small print on a sausage packet: simply not buying any meat from killed wild animals at all.