NXG PR OFILE
V
erena Bahlsen is a rebel. By her own admission, the fourth- generation heir to Germany’s renowned cake and biscuit manufacturing dynasty never wanted to work in or around her
family’s eponymous business. At any one time she wanted to pursue a career in fashion, hotels, be an artist, or a writer—anything that would allow her to be creative and original. But creativity was definitely not something she
thought she’d find on Bahlsen’s factory floor. “I had been taught for so long that business is
ging
where originality goes to die,” she muses from her office in Berlin. “Business is for grownups—it is rational, it is
spreadsheets—it is not a place to express new, exciting ideas or be dynamic. Total bulls**t of course, but that is honestly what I believed and because of that I never, ever wanted to follow my father into it.” Bahlsen, 25, is refreshingly honest when
discussing the mistakes she has made in the past. Now, as co-founder of Bahlsen’s new food innovation unit HERMANN’S, she speaks with
such excitement and eagerness about her family’s business that it is hard to believe that until only recently, she could not identify with the brand at all. And who could blame her? In 2016, whilst
celebrating the company’s 125th birthday, German media declared that as one of the country’s first national brands, Bahlsen, and their most famous product—the Leibniz biscuit— were synonymous with heritage, tradition, and obligation. One of Germany’s largest daily newspapers, Süeddeutsche Zeitung, weighed in declaring the biscuit a “monument to German design”. Meanwhile, marketing experts opined that after launching 5,000 products, Bahlsen had “remained market leaders on the shelves and in the heart of consumers for over 100 years” and should stick to its traditions. Not words a next-generation millennial looking
to be original wants to hear. “Our business is named after our family and in
Germany there is a super-heavy sense of heritage and so many connotations and expectations of preservation that comes with it,” she says. It also has an important fiscal responsibility, employing 2,830 people, with a turnover of €559 million ($671 million) in 2017. Such was the magnitude of the family name,
Bahlsen’s father, Werner Michael, made the conscious decision to shield his four children from the business to allow them to grow up without the pressure. The result was that while Bahlsen was free to pursue any career she wanted, the one thing she could not connect with, was the business she actually owned. “It is an industry where things are frozen in
time—big manufacturers making things like bread, cakes, pasta, milk that started 100 years ago and doing it all exactly the same ever since. It didn’t resonate with me or my generation who want to do new and exciting things,” she says.
Verena Bahlsen, next generation entrepreneur and co-founder of food innovation incubator HERMANN’S, is looking to drive her family’s business into the future. She spoke to Susan Lingeswaran about history, being disruptive, and preserving legacy
A new discovery Things were about to change. Werner Michael’s decision to hand over ownership of the family business to his four children when Bahlsen was just 13-years-old, triggered a series of discussions, which sparked his daughter’s interest. But the move was made primarily, Bahlsen says,
to prevent a terrible history repeating itself. Bahlsen’s grandfather, also named Werner, upon
his death had given his two sons and daughter— Werner Michael, Lorenz, and Andrea—equal
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