Kathreiner
| Kathreiner AG
|
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|---|---|
 |
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| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1829 |
| resolution | 1998 |
| Reason for dissolution | insolvency |
| Seat | Munich |
| management | Helmut Oxfart |
| Number of employees | 3173 (1997) |
| sales | 2.3 billion DM (1996) |
| Branch | Colonial trade |
The Kathreiner AG , formerly Franz Kathreiners successor AG (FKN) , with the subsidiary Kathreiner's malt coffee factories GmbH was a German group of companies in the food wholesale . The best known product was the malt coffee . In 1997/1998 the company filed for bankruptcy .
history
In 1829, after his service as a sergeant in the Bavarian army , the Munich merchant Franz Kathreiner founded a small business that initially specialized in the production of fuel oil and has been trading in spices, dyes and colonial goods since 1842 . The company's head office was located in Burgstrasse 16/17 next to the Munich City Hall and was one of the first commercial addresses in Munich.
On April 1, 1870, the merchant and later secret councilor Emil Wilhelm took over the business from the Kathreiner heirs, the Wilhelm Gradinger family. The new owner came from an old family of merchants, craftsmen and councilors residing in Lichtenfels (Upper Franconia) . His mother was a daughter of the porcelain manufacturer Carl Hutschenreuther . Wilhelm spent his training years in Bamberg and Munich, later he worked for the Heilbronn coffee wholesaler Christoph Heinrich Schmidt jr. active.
Under the name of Franz Kathreiner's successor (FKN) , he traded with his partner Adolph Brougier from Altensteig in Württemberg, who joined in 1876 and who Wilhelm from his time at the coffee shop Christoph Heinrich Schmidt jr. knew.
Under Wilhelm and Brougier, the company FKN grew in the second half of the 19th century into one of the largest and most important food retailers in Germany. The product range encompassed food from wine, champagne, fatty products to chocolates, canned goods, candles and tea, which was later sold under the “Marco Polo Tea” brand, among other things. The most important sub-area was the import of coffee beans . The import duties paid by the company rose by almost 800 percent from 40,500 marks in 1876 to 354,000 marks in 1888.
In 1888, FKN settled at Munich's Ostbahnhof on Mühldorfstrasse. In addition to a roastery, it later operated a winery , a jam factory and the canning factory Kathra factories . The production site on Mühldorfstrasse was one of the largest production sites in Munich with its own railway connection.
Before the First World War , the parent company , which was converted into a GmbH in 1897, with 550 employees, was the largest grocery store in Germany. The owners of the FKN and the Kathreiner factories were also co-founders of the Bavarian Federation of Industrialists, whose first president was the managing director of the malt coffee factories Hermann Aust .
Conversion to wholesale
In 1928 it was converted into a stock corporation . In 1971 Kathreiner AG relocated from Munich's Ostbahnhof to Poing . The subsidiary Kathreiner's Malzkaffee-Fabriken GmbH merged in 1934 with the Ludwigsburg company Heinrich Franck to create Franck-Kathreiners Malzkaffee . The best- known product, along with Kneipp 's malt coffee, was the Caro country coffee . Also popularly known as Muckefuck (from French mocca faux , 'false mocha'). Production was later taken over by the Nestlé Group, which still makes the malt coffee today.
The production of canned food and other foods was later largely discontinued and the parent company, Kathreiner AG, acted more and more as a wholesaler, service provider and operator. From the beginning of 1970, Kathreiner AG also operated several hypermarkets and supermarkets under the names Katra , KOMM and Krone for this purpose . While Katra were mostly run as small neighborhood shops with a sales area of mostly less than 1,000 m², the KOMM and especially the Krone stores were significantly larger with an average of 2,500 to 14,000 m². The company also included DIY stores , mostly KOMM or Krone DIY stores and the CADI non-food division. The hardware stores were mostly built in connection with a hypermarket on the same area.
Around the same time, another sales company called Bayerisches Handelszentrum (BHZ) was founded together with Kehrer & Weber GmbH , which is also based in Poing and a wholesaler of SPAR Handelsgesellschaft . Mainly shopping centers were built under her in southern Bavaria, with Kathreiner AG acting as general partner . Deliveries were made from the same headquarters on Gruber Strasse in Poing. In 1989 the KG was integrated into the newly founded SPAR AG and dissolved.
In 1990 expansion began in the new federal states . Kathreiner AG tried to position itself particularly strongly in the new federal states. At peak times between 1991 and 1993, two new stores were opened almost every week. A wholly owned subsidiary, Kathreiner Vertriebsgesellschaft Ost mbH, was founded for the expansion . The new markets, mostly Krone-Center, were mainly built outside the city centers. In the first few years the AG was able to achieve an increase in sales. In 1993/1994, the 2 billion DM sales mark was exceeded for the first time in the company's history, an increase of over 11%.
Bankruptcy 1997/1998
Just one year later, sales fell noticeably, mainly in the new federal states. Above all, the considerable competition and rapid growth meant that sales and income could no longer bear the costs of the new markets. The new markets became more and more expensive, while the proceeds from the competition became less and less. In 1996 the first buyers were sought for the Vertriebsgesellschaft Ost and the first stores were sold, including to the Lidl & Schwarz Group (Kaufland) and Spar AG (Eurospar). At the end of the same year the wholesale business was sold to Spar AG for almost DM 100 million. At the beginning of 1997, the sale of the loss-making locations of Kathreiner AG finally failed due to a lack of interest. In order to prevent the impending insolvency after all, the board of directors tried one last time to sell its sales lines to other interested parties. Spar AG partially responded and took over all 36 Krone supermarkets, especially in southern Germany. The 63 hypermarkets, the heart of the company with a turnover of over DM 750 million, also had to be sold. But the sale stalled and brought the AG further losses. The loss of sales in the 1996/1997 financial year was well over DM 100 million.
On December 18, 1997, Kathreiner Vertriebsgesellschaft Ost mbH filed for insolvency. Only a few weeks later, on December 31, 1997, the parent company, Kathreiner AG, filed for insolvency. In order to prevent the AG from being completely broken up and dissolved, an insolvency administrator was appointed to lead the company out of the crisis. At the beginning of 1998, KOMM and Krone were still able to sell 28 hypermarkets and hypermarkets to competitors, including Lidl & Schwarz , Spar and Tengelmann , before insolvency proceedings were opened just one month later on March 1, 1998. At the beginning of the proceedings, the company still had over 3000 employees. It was possible to sell the non-food sales company CADI with its 603 employees. All other sales lines, including the DIY stores, could only be partially sold to interested parties. All remaining markets were closed in the middle of the year. A dissolution of the AG could no longer be prevented. In both proceedings the creditors were almost completely satisfied. The insolvency administrator was the Munich lawyer Eckhart Müller-Heydenreich and the Munich lawyer Barbara Beutler at Vertriebsgesellschaft Ost. The last board member of the stock corporation was Helmut Oxfart. The company archive and other bequests are now mainly in the Bavarian Economic Archives and in the Ludwigsburg State Archives (Franck-Kathreiner).
Just one year later, CADI Vertriebsgesellschaft mbH, which had previously been sold by Kathreiner AG, also filed for insolvency. Most of the stores were sold to Tengelmann, all the others were closed.
Kathreiner's malt coffee factories
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In 1889, the Munich food chemist Heinrich Trillich began research into a substitute coffee made from barley, which Kathreiner financed from 1890 onwards. The technically demanding process was patented on March 8, 1892, but the production of the new "malt coffee" began as early as 1891. Before that, on March 1, 1891, the "water doctor" and life reformer Sebastian Kneipp had agreed to use his name for "Kneipp's Malz- Coffee "available. In 1892, "Kathreiner's Malzkaffee-Fabriken" was founded as a subsidiary of Franz Kathreiner's successor. Hermann Aust, grocer and former sugar planter, became co-owner and managed the business, Heinrich Trillich worked as technical manager. The rapid success of the new product led to numerous imitations, which, however, were successfully combated due to the trademark registered on July 5, 1891. However, there was legal certainty only after the enactment of the Trademark Act of 1894. In a test case against the businessman S. Rosenfelder, the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court ruled on October 4, 1895 that the designation of competing products as “Kneipp malt coffee” was inadmissible, but that advertising with terms such as “ according to the Kneipp system ”or similar.
The malt coffee branch was made independent in 1892 with the establishment of the subsidiary Kathreiner's Malzkaffee-Fabriken GmbH . The main shareholders were the Wilhelm and Brougier families, later partners were the Aust families and the Seißer family from Würzburg. The blue Kathreiner pack with the portrait of Pastor Kneipp is one of the first German branded articles . On January 10, 1906, the company's partners were appointed “purveyors to the court of His Holiness the Pope Pius X and the Holy Apostolic Popes”.
Little by little, further production companies were established in Uerdingen (1895), Frankfurt (Oder) (1906), Rüppurr (1906) and Magdeburg (1909), which were located in port areas due to the transport of raw materials, with the exception of the company in Rüppurr, which was later incorporated into Karlsruhe were settled. For these reasons, the Rüppurr company was relocated to the Rheinhafen Karlsruhe in 1913 . By 1910, the Kathreiners Malzkaffee-Fabriken GmbH subsidiary owned eight production plants in Germany and abroad. The Magdeburg company was expropriated after World War II and joined the consumer cooperative . He produced coffee and malt coffee under the name Röstfein in the GDR and still today .
literature
- Franz Kathreiner's successor, grocery store and coffee substitute factory. In: Julius Kahn: Munich's large-scale industry and wholesale. Munich 1891.
- From orphan to business captain. In: From Main to Jura , issue 23/2004.
- Should and have. A balance sheet. Franz Kathreiner's successor, Munich 1954
- The Munich merchant casino. A chronicle. 1982.
- Press releases from the law firm MHBK Munich, undated
- Memorandum on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Kathreiner's malt coffee factories and the 25th anniversary of the Bavarian Council of Commerce Hermann Aust. Monacensia Library, Munich undated
- Kathreiner bankruptcy. In: Lebensmittel-Zeitung from January 2, 1998
swell
- Holdings Kathreiner AG, Poing in the Bavarian Economic Archives in Munich
Web links
- Lexicon entry on kaffeetraditionsverein.de
- Entry on bwa.findbuch.net
- Historical photographs (around 1900) from the Kathreiner malt coffee factory in the Ludwigsburg State Archives
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lebensmittel-Zeitung from June 23, 1995
- ↑ Lebensmittel-Zeitung from November 15, 1996
- ↑ Lebensmittel-Zeitung from September 19, 1997
- ↑ Lebensmittel-Zeitung of January 2, 1998
- ↑ Lebensmittelzeitung from January 23, 1998
- ↑ Uwe Spiekermann: Dominant Hot Beverage - The Beginnings of Kathreiner's Malt Coffee. May 25, 2018, accessed on January 27, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Erhard Zimmer: The history of the higher regional court Frankfurt . 1976, ISBN 3-7829-0174-6 , page 62.
- ↑ Ernst Otto Bräunche: Karlsruhe Rhine Port, 1901-2001 . Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe, p. 297 ff. (Accessed on October 16, 2009).