Fritz Lieken

Fritz Lieken baking bread

Fritz Heinrich Lieken (born December 30, 1895 in Burhave ( Butjadingen ), † November 1, 1961 in Munich ) was a German baker , inventor and company founder . He invented (probably as early as 1922) the Lieken Urkorn brand, which still exists today .

Life

Fritz Lieken was the youngest of four children of the baker Friedrich Johann Christian Hinrich Lieken and his wife, the tailor's daughter Johanne Sophie Caroline Friederike, geb. Werschau. His father had been running a bakery in Burhave since 1887, where Fritz Lieken completed his apprenticeship. According to his own statements, he made an experience during the First World War that later contributed to the development of the Lieken-Simons process. In Belgium, for example, he only had to bake bread for the troops with oats and ground flour and without the usual leavening agents, and so he discovered an alternative method of dough management by chance.

After the war, Lieken passed the master baker exam in 1919. He married Auguste Hofmeister and initially ran his father's bakery. Instead, however, he wanted to make wholemeal bread in the factory using a process developed by Gustav Simons , in which the grain is swollen in water and then crushed. Therefore, in 1922, he took over the Bremer Simonsbrot bakery in Achim, which was about to be closed . With the help of his wife and a journeyman, Lieken founded his own bakery and expanded it into a wholemeal bakery. Initially hampered by inflation and mold losses, business began to flourish with the introduction of the Reichsmark . He was soon selling 200 breads a day and winning customers in Bremen and Hamburg, whom he supplied with handcarts and horse-drawn vehicles.

In 1925, Lieken was the first entrepreneur in Germany to offer branded sliced ​​bread wrapped in paper. A short time later, in 1926, he developed a technique with which bread can be preserved by wrapping it in tinfoil and then heating it to around 70 degrees Celsius. The oven-freshly packaged sliced ​​bread could be kept for several days for the first time thanks to this type of pasteurization . From then on, this made it possible to transport the bread and baked goods over longer distances. Lieken was able to sell his bread across Germany by rail. After the company expanded in 1934, around 70 employees produced 6,000 breads a day. Beginning with a donation for the Atlantic flight of the airship Graf Zeppelin in 1928, Lieken delivered bread for passengers of airships and shortly afterwards also express steamers of the North German Loyds . As a result, his company gained international fame and exported to Italy, Mexico and North America, among others.

In 1935 Lieken separated from his first wife and then married Maria, geb. War. The couple had a son (1937–1944) and adopted a daughter. Lieken's company expanded, so in 1935 he and Alfred Batscheider founded the Batscheider crispbread factory in Deisenhofen and in 1937 took over the Kasseler-Simonsbrot-factory, so that the Achimer-Batscheider-Klassler group was created. In 1941 the habenhausener bread factory in Bremen was bought up, which until 1951 produced bread as a branch of the Lieken wholemeal bread factory KG.

Even during the Second World War , Lieken was able to continue production, there was hardly any damage to the factory and prisoners of war were used as forced labor for absent employees .

Fritz Lieken brought the idea of ​​the continuous furnace to Germany from a trip to America in 1950 . He was the first German baker to open a modern wholemeal bread baking line. A second conveyor belt furnace followed in 1955. In the ten years since 1950, the company's annual sales increased from DM 700,000 to DM 12 million as a result of innovations.

In 1961 Fritz Lieken received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class, in recognition of his services to nutritional science . In the same year he died after a short illness in the surgical clinic of the University of Munich . His wife Maria continued to run the Lieken Simonsbrot company together with business partner Alfred Batscheider until 1998 . For further company history up to today see Lieken .

literature

• Günter Schnakenberg: Lieken, Fritz Heinrich. In: Heike Schlichting (Ed.): CVs between the Elbe and Weser. A biographical lexicon , Vol. III, Landscape Association of the Former Duchies of Bremen and Verden, Stade 2018, ISBN 978-3-931879-73-0 , pp. 190–194.