Margarine union
The Margarine-Union (from 1972 Union Deutsche Lebensmittelwerke ) was a food company in Germany, which was created in 1929 from the merger of the German businesses of the margarine companies Jurgens and Van den Bergh and also long after the umbrella group merged with Lever to form Unilever under an independent name Persisted.
history
In 1869 the French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès developed on behalf of the French government under Napoleon III. the first plant-based spread ( margarine ). In 1871 the Dutch entrepreneur Anton Jurgens acquired the patent. In 1888, the entrepreneur Simon van den Bergh, also from the Netherlands, founded a company for the production of margarine on an industrial scale ( Margarinewerke Van den Bergh ) in Kleve, Lower Rhine . Jurgens also built a margarine factory not far from Kleve in the neighboring town of Goch and later acquired numerous margarine production facilities in Germany. In 1927 the Jurgens and Van den Bergh families merged their Dutch businesses under the new name Margarine Unie and their British businesses under the name Margarine Union . In Germany, the branches of the two companies merged two years later, on June 19, 1929 under the name Jurgens Van den Bergh Margarine -verkauf-Union GmbH . The margarine sales union was responsible for the distribution of the products of the margarine factories, some of which belonged to other companies, and acted as the parent company for oil factories, packaging companies and retail chains, spread all over the German Reich.
On September 2, 1929, the British Margarine Union took over the common shares of the soap manufacturer Lever Brothers . The Dutch margarine Unie NV became Unilever NV. The new name symbolizes the merging of Unie or Union and Lever . Business in Germany continued to operate under the name Margarine-Union .
From 1930 the parent company Margarine-Union AG acted as a holding company for the German companies. In 1935 she started buying up companies. In 1939 Margarinewerke Berolina GmbH from Berlin-Lichtenberg, which belonged to the Margarine Union, was merged with the AG and gave up its company name. Since the supply of fat to the German population was a challenge during the war, the company tried to compensate for this by maintaining three whaling fleets. In 1941, Unilever was supposed to be confiscated as enemy property by the rulers of the Nazi dictatorship . An investigation for this is said to have shown a large, decentralized group of companies, the individual members of which were involved in supplying the population of the Greater German Reich, which meant that the rulers did not succeed in converting the group into a "German syndicate". In 1945 the company moved to Hamburg.
In 1958 the umbrella company Margarine-Union AG became a GmbH , Margarine-Union GmbH .
On January 1, 1971, the German Unilever GmbH was founded as a holding company for the German subgroup and took over the capital of all the German group’s business operations. In this context, Margarine-Union GmbH was renamed Union Deutsche Lebensmittelwerke GmbH on April 1, 1972 , among other things in order to highlight new business areas in addition to margarine. This later became part of Unilever Deutschland GmbH .
literature
- Gerhard Wöbbeking: Unilever in Germany. From the beginning to the year 2000 . Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-062442-1
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Unilever: History of Unilever in Germany .
- ↑ Wissen.de: Union German food Werke GmbH .
- ↑ Barbara Anne Hendricks from Kleve: The margarine industry on the Lower Rhine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, Bonn 1981, day of the oral examination: April 30, 1980, speaker: Hans Pohl, co-speaker: Gerhard Adelmann
- ^ Spiegel (September 28, 1960): Das Pfennig-Imperium , DER SPIEGEL 40/1960 of September 28, 1960
- ↑ https://vroniplag.wikia.org/de/wiki/Quelle:Bah/Liebstaedter_1927
- ^ Company publication from AL Mohr: Margarine-Fabrik , Altona-Bahrenfeld, 1900
- ↑ Berlin-Brandenburg Economic Archives (September 2, 2015): Margarine from Lichtenberg .