Simon van den Bergh

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Simon van den Bergh (born October 26, 1819 in Geffen , † April 6, 1907 in Rotterdam ) was a Dutch manufacturer .

Van den Bergh comes from Oss in the Netherlands . As a teenager he started working in his father's grocery store.

Life

In the second half of the 19th century, the French Emperor Napoleon III wrote. held a competition to find a spreadable mass that was similar to butter, but should stay fresh longer and be cheaper to produce. The French ruler's ulterior motive was to use the new invention to feed his troops in the field. For three years - from 1866 to 1868 - the chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès worked at high pressure on an artificial butter, then margarine was born .

Simon van den Bergh recognized the economic importance of margarine and tried to preserve the composition of the artificial butter from the inventor. When he achieved this, he started producing margarine in his company, which was founded in Oss, Netherlands in 1872 . The new synthetic butter was also delivered from Oss to the Lower Rhine region in Germany.

Out of consideration for the local (German) economy, the Bismarck government imposed a protective tariff on van den Bergh's margarine imports : an amount of 200 marks had to be paid per ton of margarine imported . To avoid these protective tariffs, Simon van den Bergh decided to relocate his margarine production to German territory.

The former spa town of Bad Cleve (today: Kleve ) rejected the establishment of margarine production in its area. For this reason, van den Bergh acquired a 6,750 m² plot of land from the then municipality of Kellen in the immediate vicinity of the Klever train station (today: van-den-Bergh-Straße) in autumn 1887 . The permit to set up a margarine factory was granted on May 3, 1888, and margarine production began in Kellen on August 20, 1888 with 14 workers.

In 1904 the Sanella brand was introduced as an almond milk plant butter margarine. In the summer of 1929 (after the death of Simon van den Bergh) the margarine works Van den Bergh in Kleve and Jurgens & Prinzen in Goch merged to form the Union Deutsche Lebensmittelwerke . In the same year a more far-reaching merger with the English soap manufacturer Lever followed . With the establishment of Unilever , the third and decisive step was taken.

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personal data
SURNAME Bergh, Simon van den
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Geffen , Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1907
Place of death Rotterdam