Christa Berger: A Profile

This profile is part of Origins Global Meats and ReEquipAfrica

Where and How We Met

I often joked that Christa and I met somewhere between Hallstatt and Turpan, along the ancient Silk Road, in the dusty basin of the Turpan Depression. This region, now part of the Taklamakan Desert in far western China, was the unlikely setting for one of the most fascinating discoveries in my research: one of the sites of the invention of nitrite curing in meat.

Over more than 15 years of dedicated work, I had rarely encountered anyone who shared this specific interest—until one day in 2024, when I received a message on LinkedIn from Christa Berger related to work I had done on salt. That message marked the beginning of the most significant academic and personal collaboration of my life.

As her sister later put it: We didn’t meet on a niche; we met on a niche within a niche.

Our collaboration began with her research in cultural anthropology. In 2025, after countless hours of work and more than 100 jointly authored articles, we realised that her academic focus had powerful commercial potential. Initially, we reached out to the Austrian spice giant Almi, based in Oftering, to contribute to our investigation into the biochemical mechanisms behind Late Bronze Age industrial pork curing in Hallstatt. From there, the idea emerged to expand the collaboration with Almi.

From Academic Cooperation to Present Application

What began as historical reconstruction of Late Bronze Age curing techniques in Hallstatt evolved into modern innovation. With Almi’s partnership and our combined insight, we began solving real-world meat formulation challenges I was facing in Nigeria:

  • Developing a unique catering bacon
  • Crafting hams from severely PSE pork, protein-compromised poultry, and DFD beef
  • Introducing plant-based fats into hybrid meat systems
  • Replacing mechanically deboned meat (MDM) with cost-equivalent pure meat products
  • Creating fat-injection systems that transformed roasted, smoked chicken

During my time in Lagos, I experienced firsthand the lack of vision from European meat equipment producers when it came to African conditions and constraints. This gap inspired a new approach, rooted in functionality, local understanding, and strategic vision. That vision gave rise to ReeQuipAfrica, a company dedicated to equipping African meat processors with fit-for-purpose machinery, refurbished equipment, and design consultation for new factories and processes.

In parallel, our advances in meat science allowed me to reposition Origins Global Meats with Christa as my partner. Originally focused on the African market, we soon found that the strategic and formulation-driven solutions we were developing applied globally, from South America and Western Europe to Russia and beyond.

Christa’s Background

These are lucky charms that Christa makes every New Year’s Eve, coloured with beetroot

Christa brings a rare combination of expertise: she holds a degree in radiologic technology and an advanced qualification in cultural anthropology. Her deep understanding of anatomy, musculature, and blood flow gave us a new way of looking at protein structure, water binding, and reaction sequences in cured meat. It led to the revival of old concepts like the bind index of various muscle groups, based on their role in blood and marrow production—ideas forgotten in modern textbooks but critical to understanding ancient curing.

She is also the founder and owner of Korrekturdienst, a high-precision language services company based in Graz. Her company specialises in German-language editing, academic proofreading, and corporate communication, delivered with an exacting editorial standard that few can match. This aspect of her work is documented in a short series I wrote exploring what sets her apart:

Her rural Styrian upbringing brought long-lost traditional techniques into our lab and factory work. Her background in anthropology allowed us to connect seemingly unrelated processes, like the use of lime, duck droppings, and urine, not only in iron smelting, but also in meat processing. These insights transformed our evaluation of the curing systems from Hallstatt and other early industrial sites.

Browsing farmers’ markets in Graz, we observed first-hand the prevalence of L-arginine curing in traditional salt-only curing methods. These observations gave us confidence in designing systems that emulate ancient efficiency without chemical shortcuts.

Today, ReeQuipAfrica supplies factories across Africa with precision-designed equipment and factory layouts, offering realistic, scalable solutions for sausage lines, bacon injection, ham moulding, smokehouse integration, and more. Origins Global Meats leads in the field of formulation, functional ingredient application, and product development strategies rooted in both modern science and ancient wisdom.

Together we form a power team!