Verena Bahlsen: The failure of the young biscuit heiress

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In this podcast episode:

Verena Bahlsen never wanted to get into the traditional family business. She preferred to work on innovative ideas to modernize the food industry and founded her own startup in her early twenties. But one night in 2018, a flash of inspiration came to her: she was the one who had to lead the Bahlsen biscuit company into the future.

After months of preparation and many ideas in her head, Verena Bahlsen takes up a newly created position in the family business. She becomes CMO: Chief Mission Officer. For the first time in the company’s history, she has a non-family CEO at her side. Their idea is to completely revolutionize Bahlsen and change the system of the food industry. But the employees at the company headquarters in Hanover do not understand the vision of the 26-year-old. There you struggle with day-to-day business and with the problems of the pandemic. In addition, the management style of the biscuit heiress is very different from that of her father: she shows weaknesses and emotions.

When war broke out in Ukraine and production costs rose enormously, the pressure on the young heiress increased until the summer of 2022 when the moment came when everything became too much for her: at an appointment in a wheat field somewhere in Germany she gets a panic attack. For them a call for help from the psyche. She immediately draws the necessary conclusions and leaves the company. She announces her resignation on the professional social network LinkedIn. “She got a lot of praise for that, especially from younger people. But even more criticism from the corner of the baby boomers, an older generation,” says Katharina Bracher in the new episode of “NZZ Akzent”.

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