profession: pilot career: actor - Jet Aviation

Ricola makes about 25 different herbal
products, which it exports to over 50
countries. The original Ricola candy has
13 herbs and was developed by Emil
Richterich, a pastry chef in the small
town of Laufen, Switzerland. When
Richterich’s son Hanspeter was born in
1930, it was clear that the profits from
the bakery were not enough to support
a family, so Richterich began to make
candy. The new business was not
successful during the time before the
Second World War, but when food was
rationed during the war, people began
to buy the brown cubes so that they
would not have to use their food coupons
for sugar. In the early 1960s, the company
decided to focus exclusively on
two of its sweets, one of which was
the herbal candy. Emil and Hanspeter
cycled from store to store with a case of
their samples, and the product was well
received. In 1967 the company built a
new factory exclusively for the production
of herbal candies.
Today, every single herbal candy still
comes from Laufen. The town is a
former Roman settlement that achieved
city status in 1295. It now has just over
5000 people, and 300 of them work
for Ricola, making the company the
second-largest employer in town. All
shares in Ricola belong to the Richterich
family, and Felix Richterich, grandson of
the founder, is chairman of the board.
Gaining popularity
The original candies are brown and square
– sort of chunky, more or less cubes with
wavy lines on top. They do not all have the
same shape. “The candies were square
because the others at the time were round,”
says Ricola CEO Adrian Kohler. “And also
because this was an easy shape for the
machines.”
The candies became a part of life in
Switzerland. Many Swiss remember being
given Ricola by their grandmother. She
would pull a candy with the yellow Ricola
wrapper from her purse, or go to the
cupboard and get the yellow tin
containing a loose jumble of the brown
cubes. The taste of Ricola was familiar
and comforting.
It did not take long for the sweets to
catch on in other countries as well. After
the Second World War, Italians came
to Switzerland to buy gasoline, and on
the same trip they picked up cigarettes,
Knorr bouillon cubes, and Ricola candies.
Responding to the interest, Ricola began
to export to Italy.
When Ricola tried to establish contacts
to export to Germany in the 1960s, Richterich
was told that the awkwardly shaped
sweets were not marketable. Eventually
a Swiss man, who headed a German
company, felt sorry for Ricola and said he
would try to sell 100,000 packages in a
year. The packages sold in one month,
Blending 13 herbs
for the original
candy
Outlook 02/2008
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