Teekanne

What they do

Teekanne blends, packs and sells tea and herbal and fruit infusions in Germany, Austria and many export markets. The group, which reports more than 1,500 employees, also includes Teepack Spezialmaschinen, a Düsseldorf company that designs and builds packing machines for tea bags. Wikipedia, citing the company, puts Teekanne's own output at about 7.5 billion tea bags a year.

Why it matters

The tea bag most of Europe uses, folded into two chambers with a string and tag and no glue, is a Teekanne development. The company patented the double-chamber bag in 1949. Its engineer and Teepack co-owner Adolf Rambold then built Constanta, a fully automatic machine that produced well over a hundred bags a minute: Teekanne cites up to 160, Teepack 120. The second chamber gives water more surface to flow around the leaves, which speeds infusion. Rambold's earlier Pompadour machine of 1929 had managed 35 gauze bags a minute.

The machine business is the hidden champion inside the tea brand. Teepack describes itself as the world market leader in its field and says it has delivered more than 3,000 double-chamber packing machines to over 50 countries. Its Perfecta line, developed from the Constanta, reaches up to about 400 bags per minute. That means a large share of the world's double-chamber tea bags, whatever the brand on the box, are packed on German machines.

Products to know

• Double-chamber tea bag: the 1949 patent behind most European tea bags.
• Teepack Perfecta: high-speed packing machine for double-chamber bags.
• Teekanne and Pompadour brands: black, green, herbal and fruit teas.

The German angle

Teekanne was founded on 16 July 1882 in Dresden as R. Seelig & Hille. Its name and teapot logo were protected in 1888 under trade mark number 6541, one of the oldest German marks still in use. Two families, the Anders and the Nisslés, have owned the company since 1898. After the Second World War, with Dresden in the Soviet zone, the business rebuilt in the West, moving its headquarters to Düsseldorf in 1957.

Sources

• Teekanne: History
• Teepack: Company
• Wikipedia: Teekanne
• Wikipedia: Adolf Rambold