Danish Crown is moving away from its multi-business-unit structure as it seeks to increase value-added processing, sharpen its European market focus and make greater use of its manufacturing, sales and product development capabilities.

Danish Crown is undertaking a major organisational transformation designed to change how the meat business operates and, ultimately, how much value it creates from livestock supplied by its cooperative owners.

The Danish food company will bring seven of its eight business units – Sokołów, Beef, Industry, Foods, KLS, UK and ESS-FOOD – into a new integrated organisation. DAT-Schaub, which focuses on the marketing and sale of by-products, will remain a separate business unit.

The change is the latest stage of a transformation that Danish Crown says will create a more streamlined business, with increased valorisation, stronger brands, greater market focus and improved cost efficiency.

“We need to be able to drive change and execute effectively across the entire company, ensuring that every part of the business supports the strategy and contributes to maximising the value of every animal we receive from our owners,” says Group CEO Niels Ulrich Duedahl.

From separate businesses to shared capabilities

The significance of the reorganisation is that Danish Crown is moving away from a structure in which its businesses have largely operated independently.

Under the new model, manufacturing, sales and product development will be shared across the integrated organisation.

The company expects this to allow it to use its scale and capabilities more effectively, rather than duplicating functions and approaches across individual businesses and countries.

“We are building an organisation based on a very clear principle: Danish Crown is one company,” says Duedahl. “At the same time, the new structure represents an important step towards increasing our competitiveness.”

The change also follows an organisational restructuring announced in June, when Danish Crown consolidated its Group Functions. That earlier phase was expected to deliver approximately DKK 500 million in efficiency improvements over two to three years and reduce around 800 positions across the international organisation over the same period.

The new organisation is expected to be fully operational within six months.

Moving further up the value chain

For food manufacturers, the most significant part of the strategy is the emphasis on valorisation – extracting more commercial value from the meat supplied by Danish Crown’s owners.

The company currently estimates that approximately 25% of owner-supplied meat is valorised through further value creation. Its ambition is to increase this to 50% by the end of 2030.

That points towards a greater emphasis on processing, product development, branded products and customer-specific solutions rather than relying primarily on the sale of less processed meat.

The strategy is already visible in Danish Crown’s beef business.

Finn Klostermann, who has been CEO of Danish Crown Beef for 12 years, will leave the company at the end of 2026. Beef will be incorporated into the new organisation, although it will remain a separate legal entity with the same ownership structure, owner services and profit distribution model. The CEO position for Danish Crown Beef will disappear from the beginning of 2027.

Klostermann says the beef operation has moved significantly towards value-added production during his tenure.

“Together with fantastic dedicated employees in beef we have increased the level of value-added processing significantly and created more commercial value from our owners’ cattle,” he says.

He points to an approach combining efficient production with branding, business development and commercial partnerships as having helped move the beef business further up the value chain.

Duedahl says the division has more than doubled in size under Klostermann’s leadership, highlighting his commercial focus and ability to identify development opportunities. He also points to Danish Crown’s recent agreement with McDonald’s as an example of the type of customer relationship the business wants to build.

Scale becomes a manufacturing advantage

The restructuring therefore has implications beyond corporate reporting lines.

By bringing manufacturing and product development together across businesses, Danish Crown is seeking to make its scale an operational advantage.

For food manufacturing, that could mean greater opportunities to standardise processes and capabilities while also developing products for specific markets and customers.

It also gives Danish Crown a clearer platform from which to pursue its ambition of becoming a cost leader in the European market.

The company is simultaneously reducing its emphasis on being a global player and concentrating on six defined core markets, with a stronger European focus.

This represents a notable shift in priorities: rather than treating geographic reach as an end in itself, Danish Crown is looking to concentrate resources where it believes it can generate greater value.

Fewer brands, stronger propositions

The next stage of the transformation will also involve reducing the number of brands and building a strategy around fewer, stronger brands.

That places product development and commercialisation at the centre of the reorganisation.

The company says its immediate priority is to establish a competitive organisation and operational platform. The next phase will focus more strongly on brands and products.

For manufacturers, this distinction is important. Danish Crown is not simply attempting to reduce overheads; the restructuring is intended to create the operating platform from which it can develop higher-value products and strengthen customer propositions.

The company is effectively linking three objectives: operate more efficiently, process more of what it receives, and sell that output at greater value.

Integration 

The reorganisation marks a further move from a collection of relatively autonomous businesses towards a more integrated food manufacturing group.

Its success will ultimately depend on whether the new structure can translate organisational scale into better manufacturing efficiency and, more importantly, greater value from each animal.

The target of increasing valorisation from around 25% to 50% by 2030 provides a clear measure of that ambition.

Klostermann’s departure also illustrates the cultural shift taking place. His beef operation was built around moving further into value-added processing, branding and customer partnerships. Danish Crown now intends to apply those principles across a much more integrated organisation.

As Duedahl puts it, the next step is to strengthen competitiveness by making better use of the company’s “scale and capabilities.”

For Danish Crown, the reorganisation is about creating a manufacturing and commercial model capable of extracting more value from its existing supply chain.