The cookie heiress who cried a lot

A panic attack is an unpredictable, intense feeling of fear. Symptoms include sudden heart palpitations, chest pain, choking sensations, and dizziness.

Verena Bahlsen, heiress to the biscuit dynasty of the same name, had such an attack when she was standing in the middle of her company’s most important raw material: in a wheat field somewhere in Germany. Next to her is Phil Rumbol, the numbers man, an Englishman, the first non-family CEO in the company’s 130-year history.

It is not known what they were talking about. Maybe it was about rising wheat prices, more and more expensive gas for the ovens, dramatically shrinking margins – who knows, maybe the visit to the wheat field was just a photo opportunity.

One thing is certain: If something like this had happened to Verena Bahlsen’s father twenty years ago, he would have been taken to the emergency room with a suspected heart attack. They would have examined him, given the all-clear and sent him home with warnings to please take it easy. Because that’s what panic attacks used to be interpreted as: maybe something to do with the heart. Or a fainting spell. But definitely something physical.

But because millennials like Verena Bahlsen have therapy experience like no other generation, it must have been clear to the 29-year-old that it was a panic attack. A cry for help from the psyche.

In the crosshairs of the baby boomers

How do we know about this intimate moment in the wheat field? From Verena Bahlsen herself. She shared it with the world on Linkedin a few days ago. Under the announcement “some sad news today” she announced that she was leaving her family’s company.

She wrote to the 2,500 employees: “I was often ashamed when you saw me in moments of fear, being overwhelmed and insecure.” She cried a lot in meetings, she was unfriendly or impatient. She would interrupt people when she should have been listening, responding coldly and harshly when she should have been soft.

Many users were able to identify with Bahlsen on a platform that is primarily about showing off their own performance. Comments have showered her with praise and admiration for her public apology. But the critics were even more numerous.

They came mainly from the group of baby boomers: that generation of the supposedly tough and capable of suffering, the retired medium-sized companies whose self-confidence had thrived on the soft cushion of the boom. This “pitying way”, wrote one who was once an entrepreneur himself, he “could never have allowed himself”. She couldn’t last long at the university either, another sneered. Bahlsen had studied management and communications at universities such as King’s College in London and New York University without obtaining a degree.

Better a startup in Berlin than the “bourgeois” company in Hanover

Verena Bahlsen would never have thought that she would one day join her family’s company. It was simply very adjusted, Bahlsen said in one in 2021 buttocksdcast: “No one expected me to ever have anything to do with the company.” Least of all yourself.

But the fact that she was still interested in her family’s business should have been noticed. Types of flour, production technology, investment strategy and entrepreneurship: she passionately talked and argued about all of this with her father. But to the outside world, she always downplayed her joy.

In 2015 she founded a startup in Berlin that develops innovations for the food industry. She would never have wanted to admit that she was interested in “something so bourgeois” as managing a traditional company in Hanover. Bahlsen preferred to think about the coming upheavals in the food industry: about the consequences of the scarcity of resources, for example, about the sustainability of raw materials and about climate-neutral production.

Your great-grandfather Hermann Bahlsen invented the word “biscuit”. When he brought the idea of ​​a hard shortbread from England in 1888 and wanted to sell it under the name “Cakes”, the Germans couldn’t pronounce the word (they said “Kacke”). That’s why Bahlsen called his product “biscuits”. In 1915 the word Duden was included.

Germany not only has Bahlsen to thank for this neologism, but also for revolutionizing the food industry. He brought the first assembly line from America to Germany. And he invented packaging in which biscuits could be stored without them getting moldy or drying out – a first in a time when groceries were sold openly.

“I have to lead Bahlsen into the future!”

All of this went through the great-granddaughter’s head when she woke up one night four years ago and knew: “I have to lead Bahlsen into the future!” What, she asked herself, would great-grandfather Hermann have done if he came back from the 19th century and saw that fewer and fewer people were buying his products, and how the world market and production conditions had changed?

Verena Bahlsen was certain: he would revolutionize the food industry again. And that was exactly what she had in mind now.

In 2018 her father resigned as CEO, the company was run by the management, the chief post was orphaned. Verena Bahlsen suggested to her father that she should work as Chief Mission Officer alongside an experienced CEO from outside the family. She would take care of how Bahlsen could exist in the future and dedicate herself to repositioning the brand. The CEO would be responsible for day-to-day business.

The implementation of this idea and the preparations for her new role took a whole year. The change in management was announced in March 2020. The lockdown began two days later – and with it a difficult time for the company.

At this point, Bahlsen must have already guessed how difficult it would be for her as a career changer. Before studying business administration, her father did an apprenticeship as a confectioner, after which he worked in various positions for the Bahlsen plants abroad for decades. His daughter, on the other hand, had no idea about the biscuit market.

At the headquarters in Hanover, nobody understood what the young woman wanted. She spoke rousingly, but often very quickly, and interspersed whole sentences in English. “I’m young, from the outside, more ‘challenger’ the industry than part of it.” She spoke of the fact that you now have to turn every stone in the whole store and ask yourself: “Are we still doing the right thing?” The choice of raw materials, the supply chain and the fundamental question of whether you are still offering the right product: nothing is sacred.

The employees, who deal with urgent problems such as shrinking brands and sales, supply bottlenecks and price pressure from the retail trade every day, actually found the charismatic young woman quite nice.

But what did she want?

The good capitalist

In an interview last year, Bahlsen claimed that it was an advantage that she didn’t have the same idea of ​​​​the biscuit business as her father. After all, in day-to-day business everything revolves around the status quo: the sales have to be right, the savings targets have to be met and new sales channels have to be found. But your job is to ensure that the company will still exist in twenty years. “And not as a biscuit company, but as a company that also makes biscuits.”

Bahlsen is convinced that the food industry is currently experiencing its “electric car moment”, a structural change that will no longer allow us to continue as before. “We’re in a situation where we’re consuming too much and consuming the wrong stuff.” With her enthusiasm and her eloquence, Bahlsen was particularly well received by young entrepreneurs in the start-up industry. In recent years she has made numerous appearances at business conferences and in the media. She was considered a capitalist with moral standards. Many were impressed.

Only at home in Hanover one didn’t let oneself get carried away. In addition, the new boss caused some embarrassment with her lively, direct manner. For example, when she publicly raved about how nice it was to be rich. She probably wanted to emphasize that she was a capitalist despite her critical attitude. She owns a quarter of the shares. Her three siblings share the rest.

Verena Bahlsen and the question of forced laborers

A little later, when asked by a journalist about the company’s past in the “Third Reich,” she responded with the demonstrably false claim that the foreign forced laborers Bahlsen employed at the time earned the same as the German employees. Hundreds of women from the Ukraine were taken to Hanover in freight cars, where they had to work under conditions similar to slavery.

Verena Bahlsen was able to implement a few things, albeit against resistance. For example, the visual redesign of the brand: Instead of the old-fashioned yellow, the Guetsli were now in white and blue packs, with her great-grandfather’s signature in large, blue letters, conspicuous and dominant. Verena Bahlsen also made sure that the “Africa” ​​biscuits were renamed because the naming was branded as racist on social networks. Dad Bahlsen could still roll his eyes.

With the outbreak of the Ukraine war in spring 2022, a crisis began for the biscuit producer, when production costs rose by double-digit millions in a very short time. In Germany, there was talk of an incipient industrial recession. In Hanover, the biscuit manufacturers fought against collapsing numbers. During this time, Verena Bahlsen’s revolutionary spirit must have suffered severe setbacks.

“I believe that traditional brands like ours are exactly the ones that will stick to a broken system for as long as possible and still benefit from it as long as they can,” said Bahlsen once in an interview. But she was apparently unable to convince the older generation in Hanover of this urgency. Her management style, which always exposed all weaknesses, may have brought her sympathy points, but it probably did one thing above all: it made the young boss vulnerable.

“Leading a company is emotional competitive sport,” Bahlsen once said: In addition to hard work and the will to learn, there is also a need for periods of relaxation. But also the ability to recognize when the resistance is too great and you have failed.

In this respect, Bahlsen has mastered her discipline.