A golden cookie for the cookie monster

Once again Bahlsen can rejoice at an anniversary. We already covered the 80th anniversary of salt sticks last year. About twelve months later it is the turn of Leibniz cookies. In honour of these “toothed” sweet biscuits there will be a special edition launched and, needless to say, the commonly known traditional packaging.

The classical packaging format: ideal for satisfying hunger between meals and for feeding not one but several hungry mouths. © Bahlsen GmbH & Co. KG

With 52 teeth and in 55 countries
He served as an inspiration for the name of the cookie, which has sent people all over the world into raptures for more than a century now: the universal scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony. This is also where the family business is headquartered and where the triumphant march of the crunchy cookie started in 1891. Despite its age the “old-timer” still has all its teeth: 52 in total. And its business success has been equally stable: more than two billion biscuits were sold in over 55 countries in 2015 alone. By the company’s own accounts, Bahlsen ranks first on the German sweet biscuits market with a market share of nearly 12% and sales worth some EUR 535 million.

Even before Henry Ford, company founder Hermann Bahlsen was the first producer in Europe to introduce assembly lines in his factories in 1905, thereby replacing traditional production in baking rooms.

Packaging caught between tradition and modernity
Alongside numerous flavours the various packaging formats have also warranted the company’s success. The corporate brand is staged with an accomplished mix of tradition and modernity thereby appealing to a wide variety of target groups. Butter cookies proved to be innovative from the outset because their packaging was among the first hermetically sealed ones. The then H. Bahlsens Cakes-Fabrik advertised this so-called TET packaging. TET resembles the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “forever”, “eternally” or “permanent”.

A real innovation in 1905: the Leibniz TET packaging protecting against air, dust and moisture. © Bahlsen GmbH & Co. KG