Jan Bredack

Jan Bredack
Born (1972-04-09) 9 April 1972 (age 54)
Salzwedel, East Germany
Occupationentrepreneur
Known forco-founder and former CEO of Veganz (later Planethic Group)

Jan Bredack (born 9 April 1972) is a German entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and was CEO of Veganz, a German wholesaler and supermarket chain for plant-based products. He founded the company in Berlin in 2011 after a management career at Daimler and led it until September 2025, from a supermarket chain described at the time as the first of its kind in Europe to a listed maker of plant-based branded goods. PETA Germany named him its first Person of the Year in 2014.

Early life

Bredack was born on 9 April 1972 in Salzwedel, a small town in East Germany. In interviews he has described a difficult childhood: a father he calls abusive, who worked for the Stasi, and a mother who taught Russian. He has also said that his brother was active in far-right circles. He trained as a motor vehicle mechanic in the GDR and later passed the master craftsman's examination. After German reunification he moved west, earning extra money at first with evening repair jobs for private clients, and later studied management part time at the University of St. Gallen.

Career

Daimler

Bredack joined Daimler-Benz in the early 1990s, starting as a roadside-assistance mechanic. He built up customer service structures in the German truck sales organisation and, at 30, became head of sales and service for commercial vehicles in Germany. He later served as technical director of Mercedes-Benz Trucks Vostok, a joint venture between Daimler and the Russian truck maker KAMAZ, where he oversaw the construction of the first Mercedes truck plant in Russia. He suffered a burnout in 2008 and left the company to start Veganz.

Veganz

Bredack became a vegan on 1 January 2009, after his burnout and influenced by his then wife, a vegetarian. He has said the decision began with animal welfare and that environmental reasons became more important to him over time. In 2011 he founded Veganz GmbH; the first Veganz store was established in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood. The chain grew to about ten stores in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Europe.

The retail subsidiary filed for insolvency in self-administration around the turn of 2016/17. Bredack said the stores had been losing up to €500,000 a month, partly because the company's own wholesale business, which supplied vegan products to chains such as Edeka and REWE, had made its own stores redundant. Veganz then concentrated on its own product brand, launched in 2015, and on wholesale; by 2021 its products were distributed to more than 15,000 retail outlets in Europe.

Under Bredack, Veganz Group AG went public on the Scale segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in November 2021 at €87.00 per share, at the bottom of the marketed range. The roughly €33.8 million in gross proceeds were largely earmarked for a new production plant in Werder (Havel), which was abandoned in 2022 over cost overruns. The share lost most of its value in the following years, and the company remained loss-making. Bredack said in a 2024 podcast interview that becoming a millionaire at 27 had cost him his grounding.

Bredack stepped down as CEO at the end of September 2025. He became managing director of OrbiFarm GmbH, a vertical-farming company built on technology licensed from a Fraunhofer institute, which Veganz had sold in June 2025 for about €30 million. The company described the buyer only as a third party; a finanzen.net report named the buyers as Bredack and a group of investors. Bredack remained the company's largest shareholder. He was succeeded as CEO first by Rayan Tegtmeier, who was dismissed after 52 days, and then by supervisory board member Sascha Voigt.

The company, renamed Planethic Group AG in 2025, filed for insolvency under self-administration in June 2026. According to the company, Bredack and CEO Voigt are financing operations during the proceedings.

Public reception

PETA Germany named Bredack its Person of the Year in 2014, the first time the award was given, for making vegan products more widely available. In the same year he was among the three national finalists of the Deutscher Gründerpreis.

Parts of the radical vegan scene rejected him as a capitalist, and Veganz stores were repeatedly vandalised. Bredack addressed this in an interview with Die Zeit titled "Ich bin der Feind" ("I am the enemy"), saying his focus on building a profitable company and working with large retail chains had made him a target.

Personal life

Bredack has been married three times and has seven children. His third wife, Maja Bredack, brought two children into the marriage, which Bredack has dated to around 2014; she was elected to the supervisory board of the Planethic Group in 2025. The family household is largely vegan. According to Bredack, five of the seven children eat vegan, as does the family dog, while the cats do not.

References

  1. ↑ "Veganz - Wir lieben Leben". www.veganz.de. Retrieved 2015-12-17.
  2. 1 2 3 "Veganz Group's Jan Bredack steps down as CEO of loss-making business". Just Food. 2025. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  3. 1 2 "Unternehmer Jan Bredack ist "PETAs Person of the Year"". PETA Deutschland (in German). Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 "The Vegan Capitalist". Oregon Business. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 "Jan Bredack: Veganz, Geld, Wertesystem, Warum (#69)". Startup Schlau (Podcast) (in German). 2024. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 Pohr, Adrian (29 October 2013). "Von Daimler Benz zum Veganismus". Zeit Online (in German).
  7. 1 2 3 4 "Jan Bredack – Der VEGANZ-Gründer im Interview". This Is Vegan (in German). 2023. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  8. ↑ "Veganz: at full steam | Organic and Wellness News". organicwellnessnews.com. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. Retrieved 2015-12-17.
  9. ↑ "Vegane Lebensmittel: Wie die Veganz-Supermärkte sich selbst abschafften". Der Tagesspiegel (in German). Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  10. ↑ "Veganz sets final offer price for IPO at EUR 87.00 per share" (Press release). Veganz Group AG via EQS News. November 2021. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  11. ↑ "Noerr advises on successful IPO of Veganz Group AG on Frankfurt Stock Exchange". noerr.com. November 2021. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  12. ↑ Geschäftsbericht 2023 (PDF) (Report) (in German). Veganz Group AG. 8 May 2024. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  13. ↑ "OrbiFarm-Verkauf an "dritte Partei"". ECOreporter (in German). 27 June 2025. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  14. ↑ "OrbiFarm-Käufer: der bisherige CEO Jan Bredack und Investoren". finanzen.net (in German). 20 November 2025. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  15. ↑ "Jan Bredack to Step Down as Veganz CEO, Will Be Succeeded by Financial Expert Rayan Tegtmeier". vegconomist. 2025. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  16. ↑ "Planethic Group files for self-administration to restructure its business operations" (Press release). Planethic Group AG via Deutsche Börse. 25 June 2026. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  17. ↑ "Insolvenzverfahren eröffnet: So soll sich der Veganz-Nachfolger jetzt verändern". chip.de (in German). September 2026. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  18. ↑ "Veganz GmbH – Finalist 2014". Deutscher Gründerpreis (in German). Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  19. ↑ Macho, Andreas (23 April 2015). "Jan Bredack: "Ich bin der Feind"". Die Zeit (in German). No. 17/2015.
  20. ↑ "Einberufung und Einladung zur Hauptversammlung 2025" (PDF) (in German). Veganz Group AG. July 2025. Retrieved 15 September 2026.