Caught at the most daunting crossroads in its history, fallen German carmaking giant Volkswagen can take solace in one segment of its business empire that continues to boom: sausages.

Volkswagen’s 2024 earnings, released on Tuesday, revealed a 3% decline in vehicle sales alongside a 30% drop in net profits. The carmaker’s rising costs and falling demand prompted the group to agree to up to 35,000 job cuts by 2030 and German factory closures in a bid to turn around its fortunes.

Volkswagen-branded currywurst, however, is showing no signs of a similar downturn.

The VW Currywurst, affectionately designated the component number 199 398 500 A, has been serving the company’s employees and locals around its Wolfsburg headquarters since 1973. 

Made in-house by a Volkswagen-employed butcher, the currywurst feeds the company’s tens of thousands of employees across its German plants. It can also be found at the Wolfsburg football stadium and in supermarkets around Germany.

The IG Metall union, which represents Volkswagen’s German workers, confirmed that Volkswagen had sold 8.552 million portions of its currywurst last year.

That’s only slightly lower than the 9 million cars the entire Volkswagen group sold last year. The currywurst sales already dwarf those of the Volkswagen brand itself, which stood at 5.2 million vehicles last year.

The company sold 6.3 million of its original currywurst in 2024, of which one in ten were consumed by the company’s workers. Another 2.2 million were sold as a hot dog version of the currywurst via retail.

The group also managed to sell 42,000 units of a vegan version of its beloved sausages.

“Volkswagen stands for innovation – on two, four and many other wheels and yes – also on the plate!” Volkswagen HR director Gunnar Kilian posted on LinkedIn on Monday.

“With over 8 million Volkswagen Genuine Curry sausages sold, we are celebrating a new sales record. But we are not resting on our laurels: Our next currywurst coup is already in the works!”

The IG Metall Union, which sparred with Volkswagen for months last year to find a way out of the carmaker’s decline, made a point of highlighting the humble sausage’s growing significance compared with its vehicles.

“For years now, Volkswagen has sold more currywursts than vehicles bearing the VW logo—although such a comparison is, of course, a matter of taste. 

“One thing is certain, however: With the current 8.6 million units, VW’s currywurst sales are not only once again outpacing the core passenger car brand’s sales (2024: 4.8 million units), but are also moving closer to the cross-brand vehicle sales of the entire Group.”

The group’s head of food production promised more innovations to the VW Currywurst, including a ready-to-eat version that comes complete with another Volkswagen product, the part number 00010 ZDK-259-101, known by its more common name: ketchup.

Volkswagen sold some 629,000 bottles of its VW spiced ketchup last year, in addition to 25,000 10-liter buckets. The company for the first time distributed its ketchup to customers in the U.S. last year, with the free-of-charge Gewürz Ketchup Brand flying off the carmaker’s shelves.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning! New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will talk with Trump, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has a new podcast, and Amy Griffin found the power in vulnerability. Have a restful weekend.

– Telling her story. About five years ago, Amy Griffin started remembering. Through a combination of journaling and MDMA therapy, a long-buried trauma—repressed memories of childhood sexual assault—finally came to the surface. It’s a story that Griffin shares in her new book The Tell, which was just named the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick.

In the memoir, Griffin recalls the picture-perfect version of her life growing up in Texas, before shattering that image with these memories—then retreading that narrative and reevaluating everything. During the time period that Griffin recounts experiencing an endless onslaught of memories, she was only a few years into running her firm, G9 Ventures. G9 has backed female-founded brands like Bumble, Saie, Bobbie, and Midi.

Yet as she remembered this experience herself, and then began telling others about it, she found that doing so strengthened her relationships in all areas of her life—including the burgeoning relationships in her professional life. (Before founding G9, Griffin says she had “been in the background by choice,” raising her four kids with her husband, the hedge fund founder John Griffin.) “I realized that once I was first honest with myself, I was able to go and be honest with other people—the women in my life, my children, my family, my husband,” she says. “Everything was better in my life when I was vulnerable. There’s a power in vulnerability and it changed my relationships for the better.”

During those most intense months, Griffin remembers “days when I could barely get up off the floor, when I was trying to go on Zooms for work and put on a face to say, ‘Yes, I’m helping this others, I’m taking this call to build businesses and create value for women,’ and yet I could barely get dressed.”

Once she stopped trying to hide what was going on from others or from herself, it changed how she built relationships with the founders in her portfolio. She can show up as her “full self” to help them, now that she knows who that self is. She isn’t scared by what once seemed like big problems. And she’s not afraid to have the hard conversations anymore. “I have a confidence now in the idea that it’s all going to work out,” she says. “When someone’s panicked about funding or they’re not growing at the rate they should be, we just have really honest conversations and we figure it out.”

She found unlikely connections between her work as an investor—where she is most passionate about brand and creative—and telling such a personal story. “Brand-building is what I love to do—this wasn’t a brand, but there’s the idea that I would tell my story and be honest about my truth,” she says.

Griffin says she looks for “humility” in founders. And many of those founders and friends have shown up to support her, through her process of remembering, writing, and now publishing her story, from Spanx’s Sara Blakely to Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd to Kitsch’s Cassandra Thurswell, to Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Her biggest takeaway, though, applies beyond her close-knit circle. “You never know what’s going on in someone’s life,” she says she’s learned. “Always give someone the most generous belief in what they’re going through.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Elon Musk’s Tesla has written to the Trump administration, warning it is ‘exposed’ to retaliatory tariffs. With supply chains still reliant on imports, the EV maker urged a cautious approach to avoid “inadvertently harm U.S. companies.”

Just days after Elon Musk turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom, the company has written to the Trump administration with concerns about international retaliation to tariffs.

In an unsigned letter addressed to U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer, Tesla warned that “U.S. exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to U.S. trade actions.”

The company cautioned that aggressive tariffs could lead to retaliatory measures from other nations that could directly impact American manufacturers and exporters. The EV maker highlighted the potential fallout for the automotive sector, pointing to past trade actions that have triggered immediate countermeasures.

“For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on EVs imported into those countries,” Tesla said in the letter dated March 11. The company also warned that tariffs could impact the supply chain as “certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the United States.”

The letter reiterates concerns expressed by many other U.S. business leaders over Trump’s aggressive trade tariffs, but, this time it’s coming from a close ally.

“It’s a polite way to say that the bipolar tariff regime is screwing over Tesla,” a person familiar with the sending of the letter told the Financial Times. “It is unsigned because nobody at the company wants to be fired for sending it.”

Tesla CEO Musk has been heavily involved in the Trump administration, emerging as the face of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk campaigned heavily for Trump during his campaign and has become one of the most visible figures in the new administration.

While Tesla said in the letter that it “supports” fair trade, it urged the administration to ensure that the Trump administration’s efforts “do not inadvertently harm U.S. companies.”

U.S. exports will “benefit from a phased approach that enables them to prepare accordingly and ensure appropriate supply chain and compliance measures are taken,” the letter added.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

Industry-wide concerns

Tesla’s concerns echo broader industry warnings about the unintended consequences of broad-based tariffs, which could disrupt production and increase prices.

The Trump administration is weighing the implementation of sweeping tariffs on vehicles and auto parts produced worldwide, to go into effect as early as April.

In the letter, the company pointed to its significant investments in domestic production, including its battery manufacturing plant in Nevada and lithium processing operations in Texas.

However, Tesla said that even with a concerted effort to localize supply chains, certain key materials are still reliant on imports.

It urged the Trump administration to “further evaluate domestic supply chain limitations to ensure that U.S. manufacturers are not unduly burdened by trade actions that could result in the imposition of cost-prohibitive tariffs on necessary components.”

Tesla is not alone in its concerns. Autos Drive America, a trade group representing major foreign automakers such as Toyota, Volkswagen, and BMW, has also cautioned against sweeping tariff measures.

The group warned that “broad-based tariffs will disrupt production at U.S. assembly plants.”

It said that, because automakers cannot move their supply chains overnight, “cost increases will inevitably lead to some combination of higher consumer prices, fewer models offered to consumers and shut-down U.S. production lines, leading to potential job losses across the supply chain.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com