Haribo started with a sack of sugar and a copper pot
In 1920 a Bonn confectioner registered a company whose name stitched together the first syllables of Hans Riegel Bonn. His starting kit, the firm says, amounted to one sack of sugar, a copper pot, a slab of marble and a stove. Two years later he made a soft gummy bear that danced.
Johannes Riegel registered the business on 13 December 1920, and his wife Gertrud became its first employee the following year. Production began in a house on Bergstraße in Kessenich, a district of Bonn. In 1922 Riegel created the forerunner of today's bears, called Tanzbär, or Dancing Bear. It was larger and softer than the modern sweet because it relied on gum arabic rather than gelatine. Licorice followed in 1925.
War nearly halted everything, as raw materials ran short. Riegel died in March 1945 and his widow kept the firm going until their sons Hans and Paul came home from captivity in 1946. The brothers split the job neatly: Hans was the public face, Paul ran research and product development and stayed out of sight. From the 1960s they expanded abroad by swallowing local sweet makers, including a Dutch firm, a Marseille factory and, in 1972, Dunhill's, an English maker of liquorice Pontefract cakes dating back to the eighteenth century. Maoam joined in 1986.
The bears got their trademark name, Goldbears, in 1960 to set them apart from imitators. Each is about two centimetres tall, with gelatine providing the chew. By 2013 sixteen factories were producing more than 100 million gummy bears a day. Apple arrived as a green flavour in 2007, pushing strawberry over to light red, and the bears gained a smiling face. Halal versions made with beef gelatine come from a factory in Turkey, while kosher ones are produced in Austria.
In America the sweets arrived through local importers in Hawaii and California in 1972, before spreading nationwide. Hans Riegel Junior died in October 2013, and after a family dispute over succession the two branches now hold equal halves of the company, headquartered since May 2018 in Grafschaft.
Source: Haribo
