What do you think of this fact?
According to Smithsonian Magazine, about 160 million Goldbears leave Haribo factories around the world every day. The whole thing started with equipment that would fit in a student kitchen.
A kitchen, a sack, a rolling pin
Hans Riegel, a trained confectioner from the Bonn area in Germany, founded his own company on 13 December 1920, according to Haribo. The name is an abbreviation you might already know: HAns RIegel BOnn.
The shopping list is the fun part. According to Haribo, the original production setup was a sack of sugar, a marble slab, a stool, a stove, a copper pot and a rolling pin. That’s it. No machines, no assembly line, just a small kitchen.
The first employee rode a bike
In 1921, the company got its first employee: Riegel’s wife, Gertrud. According to Haribo, she delivered the daily production by bicycle until the company got its first car in 1923. For a product you can now find in almost any supermarket, that’s a pretty modest fleet.
First the Dancing Bear, then the Goldbear
In 1922, Riegel invented the Dancing Bear, a bear-shaped fruit gum. According to Smithsonian Magazine, it was larger and slimmer than today’s gummy bears, and its shape was reportedly inspired by the dancing bears that performed at festivals back then. During Germany’s inflation years, Haribo says two Dancing Bears cost one pfennig.
The slogan “Haribo macht Kinder froh” (“Haribo makes kids happy”) dates from 1930, and “und Erwachsene ebenso” (“and grown-ups too”) was only added in the mid-1960s. Goldbears in their current form came out in 1960, and in 1967 the German Patent Office registered them as a trademark.
Bonus fact: In the 1930s, Haribo already had about 400 employees, and by 1950 it had about 1,000.
A global company, launched with a rolling pin. The bike paid off too.