Who Owns Your Tofu? These Brands Are Still Independent [Overview]

Buying tofu used to be simple. Since the Theo Müller group took over tofu pioneer Berief, the chiller aisle reads like a shareholding chart: Behind friendly plant-based branding sit dairy corporations, meat processors and financial investors. If you want to know where your money ends up, you have to dig through the company register. So we did.

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Jump straight to a group: Independent brands · Corporate without animal business · Meat and dairy corporations · Aldi, Lidl & Co. private labels · FAQ

How we sorted the brands

Three groups, one simple logic. Green means: The brand belongs to itself, a founding family or its own people. Yellow means: There is a corporation or investor behind it, but not one whose core business is animals. Red means: A meat or dairy corporation earns money with every purchase.

Our basis: German company register data (via northdata.de), legal notices, company statements and trade press. Every rating is linked right at the brand. What we cannot prove, we do not claim. And because ownership changes, the date of our last check sits at the bottom of the article.

Green: These brands are independent

The good news first: A large share of the tofu in organic stores, and increasingly in supermarkets, comes from companies that own themselves. Unfold the brands you care about.

Yellow: Corporate, yes. Animal business, no.

This is where it becomes a matter of perspective. These brands belong to investors or food groups, but not to a company whose core business is meat or dairy. If you only want to avoid the animal industry, you can shop here. If you would rather not feed corporate structures at all, look one group up.

Red: A meat or dairy corporation earns along

The products in this group remain vegan. But the profit flows to companies whose core business is milk or meat. That was exactly the sore point of the Berief takeover by Müller, and Berief is no outlier.

What about private-label tofu from Aldi, Lidl and dm?

The uncomfortable answer: Retailers do not disclose who produces their discounter and drugstore tofu. What is on record: Berief runs its own private-label vehicle, SOJA Food GmbH (company register via Northdata), and produces private labels for drugstores and discounters according to Augsburger Allgemeine. Which product comes from which factory is not public. That is why you will not find a “Aldi tofu is made by X” list here. If you want certainty with private labels, you currently have one option: Buy brands whose owners are on the record.

Why ownership matters at all

You could dismiss this whole debate as bean counting. The tofu stays vegan no matter who owns the factory. But the maths reaches beyond the plate: Every euro of profit strengthens the company behind it, its loans, its lobbying, its next investment. With a dairy group, it flows into a business model built on using animals.

The scale is not a matter of feeling: In Germany alone, around 746 million land animals were slaughtered in 2025, 48.5 million pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and horses plus 697.3 million chickens, turkeys and ducks (Destatis), fish not counted. That these are sentient beings is scientific consensus (New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, 2024) and written into EU law (Art. 13 TFEU).

That is why the ownership question is more than a detail for many people. It has little to do with purity and a lot to do with where market power accumulates. If you would rather give your money to companies that have worked without animals from day one, the green group offers plenty of choice. And if you are still weighing how processed all of this is: Our piece on whether vegan alternatives are really ultra-processed sorts the evidence.

Frequently asked questions

Is Berief tofu no longer vegan?

It still is. The takeover changes nothing about the products and recipes for now; according to vegconomist, Berief will continue as a largely independent unit. The question is a different one: The profit now lands with a dairy corporation. Whether that is a dealbreaker is up to you.

Does Taifun belong to a corporation?

No. Taifun-Tofu GmbH belongs to itself through its own holding company and is run by its co-founder. You can verify this in the company register; the link sits right at the brand above.

Who makes the tofu sold by Aldi, Lidl and dm?

That is not public. What is documented: Berief supplies private labels through SOJA Food GmbH, without any individual product being attributable. Retailers also switch suppliers regularly. Nothing more precise can be said seriously, and we will not pretend otherwise.

How can I check who owns a brand myself?

Three steps are enough: The legal notice on the brand’s website names the operating company. Look that company up on northdata.de to see shareholders and holdings. And the brand name plus “takeover” in a news search surfaces the rest. Five minutes, works for any brand, including those not on this list.

This list stays up to date

Ownership changes, especially now that corporations have discovered the plant-based market as a growth area. We track takeovers in the sector continuously and add changes here, with dates. Bookmark this page, and if you spot a takeover we missed: Write to us.