Dr. med. Aufdermaur discovers the unique, beneficial effects of natural herbs. He successfully treats his patients’ coughs, hoarseness or bronchial catarrh using selected herbs. His brother-in-law, Mr Bissig, begins to press these herbs into a mixture. After making these lozenges in the basement at home, he sells them directly to village stores and pharmacies.

1922, Dr. med. Aufdermaur

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

Because I did not earn enough in the carpentry workshop in my father’s opinion, I later took a job in a small sweet factory in Dietikon.

There I had to prepare the firewood for the steam boilers in the woodshed.

In addition to my work in the woodshed, I was also able to help out from time to time with the production of sweets, which I always found really interesting. I proved to be quite capable. The production manager therefore taught me a lot of manual operations and the necessary understanding of the technical processes.

The company boss controlled what was happening in the packing rooms with his microphone, and he intervened by loudspeaker whenever someone made a joke. “You are here to work, not tell jokes,” he then barked from the loudspeaker. For me though, even this period of harassment under very strict management was still better than an unskilled job in a carpentry workshop. I was really inspired by sweet making.

 1945, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

At the end of the 1940s when I was just finishing military cadet school in Basel, a colleague drew my attention to an advertisement: a company in the region was looking for a sweets specialist. My colleague had introduced himself in response to the advertisement, but felt that he was too good for this job, as no sweets were being produced at the moment. He said “he knew a good man for the advertised post”. He urged me: “You have to apply there, it’s just the thing for you.” In response to my reservations that I was not a sweets specialist though, he said: “Just give it a try, we’ll help you if you have any problems.”

One Saturday, I introduced myself to the company. The boss showed me his business and presented me with an offer that was generous for me and that time: he offered me 520 Swiss francs a month as a starting salary for my position as operations manager.

After military cadet school, I took up the post and had a man and a woman in my team. My first task was to get the production of boiled sweets up and running as quickly as possible, which was nothing special for me. The only thing was, there wasn’t any kind of machinery. By the way, that was the beginning of my creativity in making my own production equipment, because I always had to improvise.

1947, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

While working as a sweets specialist, a tinsmith and I constructed a suitable double boiler made of copper with a vacuum to produce the sugar mass. We obtained a roller embossing machine from Italy to portion the pieces. The cooked sugar mass was emptied onto a marble slab to cool, boiled sweets were pressed through rollers, shaped and finally filled into cellophane bags. We constantly expanded the range with raspberry boiled sweets and orange and lemon slice mixes. We produced a summer mix with fruit boiled sweets and a winter mix with aniseed sweets and cough sweets etc. I let my imagination run wild time and again when developing these new products. Together with designers, machine manufacturers and inventors, I discussed new process technologies and worked out practical designs. This gave me the foundation and knowledge for further developments in my own business.

When I joined the company in 1948, it employed just one elderly man and one woman. When I left the company in 1966 after 18 years, the workforce had grown to 75 employees. I gradually hired my siblings for the production and filling of sweets. Almost all of them were employed by me at one time or another.

All new employees had to be trained, because at that time sweet making was not yet a recognised apprenticeship. It was only much later that there was a confectionery school.

More and more beautiful and better products were in demand. Through persistent trial and error, I managed to make the craziest things that were almost impossible to make in a factory.

I acquired all my knowledge in practice and from books – I read a huge number of books and tried out recipes and new methods at home.

1948, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

I was the rooster in the henhouse with all the female employees. I was particularly taken with a pretty girl from a farming family in Bergdietikon. She was a natural, lively person from the same background as me. When I realised that my liking for her had turned into a great love, I gave the efficient employee her notice. She was very upset by this but I did not want to start an “affair” in the company. We cultivated our relationship outside the company at weekends, although I didn’t have much time because of my great commitment to the company. My love for Doris was too great though and we married in 1952 and had a happy marriage.

1952, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

I was comfortable in my job as a sweets specialist; I wasn’t thinking about going self-employed or changing jobs. But things usually turn out differently than you think. I got to know a businessman, but nobody really knew what he actually did. In August, he advertised for sales reps, and in September he took two reps on a sales trip in his big American car. They said he did something with cough lozenges. My father found out one day that he wanted to give up his business; he was letting it “run down”. My father said it would be something for me. I immediately went to him and asked him exactly what he did. He said he produces cough lozenges under the name Dr. med. Aufdermaur, which he sells directly to a larger circle of customers throughout Switzerland. He asked whether I would be interested in his business. I would have to know what exactly it was about first, I said. Whereupon he showed me the lozenge production in the basement; a mixing machine and two tablet presses… It was important to him to be able to make the healing power of special herbs available to many people, and so he specialised in the production of herbal lozenges for coughs, catarrh and hoarseness.

The businessman did not want to expand his business. He did not need to and could live quite well without his business. For him, it was more about being away from home for a few months each year. He offered me his company with the rights to its name “Dr. med. Aufdermaur”, as he said, for a pittance. But for me it was a large amount of money at the time; I therefore wanted to consider the offer carefully. I agreed with my employer that I would be allowed to store the machines and would be solely responsible for the distribution of the products. The deal seemed like it was going to be a good one. I was assured that orders galore came in every autumn. I could contact the buyers and get the distribution going again that the businessman wanted to phase out.

Soon the first orders came in by letter and telephone, but also enquiries as to why no one was coming by anymore. “Send your representative over to us,” they said from time to time. So there did seem to be a certain demand.

I wanted to go on the sales trip from September to November each year. The plan was to visit all the clients in those three months.

1962, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

So I started travelling from shop to shop – a tedious and time-consuming business. As I had never worked in field sales before, it was a completely new challenge which I was disappointed in time and again. The first autumn, the businessman came along on the tour and introduced me to his customers. The gentleman was sixty at the time. He had always run his business in the same way for about forty years. He was a typical “salesman”, a jack of all trades. He knew exactly how the rural population thought in the different regions and told his customers what they wanted to hear… He didn’t have an itinerary, he visited the shops rather randomly. He left out new modern shops, preferring to stick to rural stores and old-fashioned corner shops. He could also get terribly upset when isolated shops were closed one day a week as part of the new times. “You can’t really travel anymore; you never know when the shops are open,” he then complained loudly. So we drove around the country for a whole beautiful autumn… I saw that his distribution was not organised. Nevertheless, I didn’t have any great concerns. I thought: the production is secured and distribution can be expanded and improved. Moreover, I was quite proud to be the owner of my own company. But we soon realised that things could not go on like that, we could never get off the ground that way. Later, when I started travelling alone and organised my visits more systematically, visiting one shop after another on my itinerary, I realised that the businessman had not visited many shops for a long time. There was usually a new generation in the shop. When I introduced myself, for example, a young woman called out to the back: “Come out front, Dr. Aufdermaur’s sales rep is here.” I then heard back, “What, is he still around? He hasn’t been to see us for a long time.” While I was already looking forward to a big order, the woman rummaged around in a drawer, took out some dusty ancient Dr. Aufdermaur lozenge tins and said: “We’d be happy if you’d take this merchandise back in exchange for a credit note. The customer who used to buy them died, and since then the lozenges have just been lying around here.”

New remedies had become popular, pushing the old products out of the market. So sales plummeted more and more. Many a time I came back with more old goods from my predecessor’s sales than I had placed orders for new goods. That’s when I came to the realisation: “What a load of rubbish you’ve bought, you’ll never be able to sell it again.” My self-employment presented my wife with almost unsolvable problems. All the ordered goods had to be sent by post, packed ready for forwarding – about 20 to 60 small packages a day. Delivery notes, addresses, accompanying documents had to be written, the goods had to be driven to the post office every day by cart. Our three children also wanted to help with the packing, resulting in a marble, dummy or small toy being enclosed in the parcels now and again.

1962-1964, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

I finally decided to go self-employed. This resulted in a major row with my employer and I stopped working for him immediately. Today I no longer know whether he dismissed me without notice or I ran away from him. Out of revenge and as a “thank you” for my many years of service to him, he then badmouthed me. He wrote to all my suppliers that he would immediately cut off his business relations if they continued to supply me with the slightest little thing.

My first job as a self-employed entrepreneur was to review the product range and develop new products. I had just developed a new sweet under the name Dr. med. Aufdermaur. Naturally, the mass had a very beneficial composition with twenty selected herbs – I called this sweet “Hustenzucker” (cough sweet). Of course, the old-fashioned round tin can with the Dr. med. Aufdermaur lozenges was out of the question as packaging for my new product. I created a modern pack that was easy to open.

Some suppliers followed by old boss’ request and refused to supply me. One company stopped supplying me with tins. Another company which I bought my herbal extract from only wanted to deliver against immediate cash payment: the driver unloaded the ordered goods on the ramp and told me that if I paid for the delivery right now, everything would be fine, otherwise he would have to take the goods back. “Take them back,” I reply, “I can’t pay today.”

I now had to carry out my production in my own premises. In Seebach I found a sad old shack with a concrete floor and a ramp. I bought a second-hand steam boiler and the necessary second-hand sweet-making equipment from a company in Germany. With that, I started making my own product, cough sweets without any synthetic flavourings or colourings – all purely natural.

I started with two distributors for my products in Italy and Austria. They bought my product as resellers, and some of them filled my cough sweets into their own packaging. We fell flat on our faces with these two partners. I had delivered goods to these companies up to a very high amount on open account several times before we realised that they were absolutely unable and unwilling to pay. Then came the day when we finally ran out of money and had to stop. All our savings, which we had made while earning well in employment, were gone. Four sales reps were employed for distribution, who visited the retailers. But the effort was disproportionate to the return. In addition, most of the goods had to be delivered on consignment. So we edged more and more towards bankruptcy. The rented premises in Seebach had to be given up, I disassembled all the machines to make the herbal sweets and stored them in my father’s barn in Geroldswil.

We were in such a bad way that we could hardly buy the urgently needed food. Imagine what it felt like for me and my wife when we received a few hundred Swiss francs in an anonymous letter saying we should buy the most essential food for our children. I never found out who the noble benefactor was.

1965-1967, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

I had a financial problem. So I looked for any way to earn money.

A clever sales rep I worked with from time to time to test some of my products drew my attention to the urinals, toilets in restaurants and cafés, which always stank terribly. He said that I could develop a product that would at least make this unpleasant situation bearable. I immediately started thinking about what I could do about this. I knew a chemist, Mr Wegman, who told me that a company was making a cleaning concentrate that produced lots of foam. I purchased a litre of it and experimented with it. The cleaning was good, but it didn’t smell of anything. So I pulled a few strings and looked for a very concentrated perfume with a violet, lily of the valley or spring flower scent. After several mixing attempts, I succeeded in producing a cleaning solution that smelled really refreshing.

I had invented a very good toilet oil. I tried this product on some well-known restaurant owners, and lo and behold, it was pretty successful. The guests quickly noticed it and told the restaurateur that it smelled much better in his toilet than in the restaurant. Several guests asked about the product. And so it transpired that some of them applied to me to resell the product. I then gave the product to several resellers and agents in German-speaking Switzerland and exclusivity to another one for Ticino. You cannot imagine what a thriving business it turned into. Most Saturdays, my brother and I bottled five to ten 50-litre canisters. The recipe was: 500 g foaming agent, 100 g violet perfume, 50 litres cold water.

Unfortunately, the story did not last very long. After about two years, other more modern, cheaper products for the same purpose came onto the market. At least my livelihood was briefly secured by this product. 100 litres brought in 800 Swiss francs without work. We always made 200 to 300 litres on a Saturday morning.

1968, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

As I was not really busy, I was constantly thinking about new possibilities – another new invention was the first sugar-free sweet. I still had two old tablet press machines for the production of Dr. med. Aufdermaur lozenges from when I took over the machines. I had always thought of making a sugar-free sweet. This did not exist at that time, and yet many people already felt that too much sugar was being eaten.

Thanks to a unique idea, I managed to process the diabetic sugar “sorbitol” into a compressible mixture. This was a sensation, because until now, only sugar or dextrose could be used for tabletting, which was granulated wet beforehand and then dried... I practised on my tabletting machines until I produced the first sugar-free sweet in line with the market. There was always the danger that the matrix could be ruined if the mixture was not right. Damage that would have cost thousands of Swiss francs, depending on the plant.

I made my first sugar-free sweet in the form of round lozenges, hand-packed into rolls similar to rolls of peppermints. The demand was not exactly overwhelming. I would have needed a powerful advertising campaign to launch this unique product on the market, but I didn’t have the money for that. This new sweet also had to be tested for non-cariogenic effect by the Dental Institute in Zurich, which again cost a lot.

I contacted a large German manufacturer of compressed tablets… A strong trend towards sugar-free products had been noticeable since the end of the sixties. A sweet like the one I had invented would have an excellent chance on the market if it really did not cause tooth decay, said the owner of this company. They specialised in tabletting and had already made countless attempts but had not succeeded in this in all these years. So much scepticism made me a little uneasy. I couldn’t prove that my sweet didn’t cause tooth decay, I said, but I would consult the experts.

I then made an appointment with the dental institute where trials are done with foods that cause tooth decay. My sweets were tested there in hour-long trials with the pH values in the test subjects’ saliva being continuously measured. The analysis cost 15,000 Swiss francs and produced a positive result for me… My later business partner was enthusiastic. We arranged an appointment. But he was still very worried that his tabletting plant might break in the attempt. Of course, he did not have eccentric presses that pressed one tablet after the other (i.e. about 80 to 100 per minute), but modern rotary presses from the Fette company that made thousands of tablets in one minute. But such an operation cost about 20,000 German marks at that time. I was absolutely sure of myself, because I had already conscientiously and successfully tested my mixture on my plant. So I drove to Germany with a 50 kg paper bag and was first impressed by the company’s huge production facilities. Then we went to the lab, where three white-clad gentlemen were waiting for us, and prepared our experiment. I wanted to put my powder into the tabletting machine, but the white-clad gentlemen were worried about their equipment. They said they had already made countless unsuccessful attempts and they did not want to sacrifice the expensive plant for another attempt. “Sorbitol” cannot be agglomerated and therefore cannot be tabletted into sweets. This was a fact that had to be accepted. Unfortunately, I could not give any assurance that I would cover the damage to the equipment in the event of a failed attempt. But I was firmly convinced of my product. I implored the boss of the company to trust me and also to take a risk. “You must believe in me,” I said, to which he replied: “Let’s to do it.” The machine was put into operation and filled with the powder. The tension was great – then the machine spat out the tablets: they were hard and shiny and everything was wonderful. The boss jumped a foot into the air and started swearing loudly. “What's going on now?” I thought. “Am I surrounded by idiots? How many years have we been tinkering with this now?”, he asked his lab assistants. “In all these years you’ve achieved nothing, and along comes this simple man from Switzerland, brings us his powder, runs the machine, and the most wonderful tablets come out.” He was really raging and sent his experts away. He patted me on the back and paid me great compliments. Fortunately, or maybe not, we had already negotiated the conditions beforehand. We signed a five-year contract and fixed the license fees.

It took about half a year until the new product was ready for the market… The negotiated contract no longer suited the boss, he wanted to pay me off with a one-off settlement. He explained that he could only launch the new product on the market with a big advertising campaign, and as a licensor I would logically have to participate in that. That didn’t suit me either, but at the time I could use the money, so I agreed and accepted a substantial amount as a one-off settlement.

1969, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

Even in those days, I was always studying and researching another absolute novelty: the project for an instant tea. I thought that if the cough sweets were dissolved in water, this might make a fine tea to relieve coughs. We involved tasters in drugstores who promoted our idea. But that did not go so smoothly. When we investigated, we found that the housewives found it difficult to dissolve the sweets because our product was a hard boiled sweet. It was hard as a rock and could only be dissolved with a lot of patience and time, stirring constantly in cold to warm water. In hot water, the sweet turned into a thick lump. Naturally the customers were put off by this. They appreciated the good tea, but thought it was too complicated and time-consuming to make. I studied this problem for a long time. I thought there must be something to make a herbal extract in an instantly soluble form. Although this name was not yet known at the time, the search for the “instant drink” had begun… All this time, and later, I was experimenting on the idea of an instant tea in the basement. Instant Nescafé already existed back then. However, the product didn’t have the best reputation because in the beginning Nescafé was still a fine powder that didn’t dissolve easily. But then Nestlé made the absolute breakthrough with its Nescafé Gold. This was something completely different, a beautiful, aromatic granulate that dissolved in water instantly and also in milk without any problems.

I thought if I could do the same with an instant tea with the full herbal flavour, it would be a total breakthrough. In our basement in Oetwil I ground and dried my herbal sweets, ground and remixed them again etc., but nothing decent ever came out; the stuff always remained sticky. Then I tried it with a mixture of sugar, dextrose and my 20-herb extract and honey – no more boiled sugar. I mixed these substances in a household kneading machine; the whole thing resulted in a mass like wet sawdust. I pushed this mass through a sieve over and over again and put it on small boards on the heating to dry overnight. The next morning I examined the result, only to find each time that nothing useful had come of it. The name “Siebeli-Seich” (sieve swill) also comes from that. My youngest, who was just starting to talk, kept witnessing me commenting on the failed experiments with the expression “What a swill”. If you asked him what daddy was doing, little Andi would say again and again: “Daddy’s making sieve swill.” My acquaintances also often asked me: “What’s happening with your sieve swill?” But I could not get the idea out of my head. Some nights I got up and tried out a new idea in the basement. Which always upset my wife. She would say, “Why don't you leave it for now, you can carry on tomorrow.” But I always had to try out the new idea immediately and it didn’t give me a moment’s peace until I succeeded.

After this three-year intensive research, I succeeded in producing the method for dried, all-natural herbal mixtures in granulate form.

1969, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

At that time, I approached the chemists’ purchasing cooperative, Amidro, and was well received with my instant herbal tea. At the first meeting, Director Bühlmann was very well disposed to me, and Marketing Manager Christen said my tea was a great product. A few days later, it was a Monday, he phoned me: he was just in the neighbourhood and would like to pick up ten tins of my tea from me. We met at Restaurant Hecht in Dietikon, where I handed him my tins. Because he didn’t want the goods in the boot, we put them in a paper bag on the floor between the front and rear seats.

The following Saturday, Mr Christen called me all excited. He had forgotten my tins of tea for a whole week. When he went to clean his car, he discovered the mess: the tins had opened and the tea granules had spread all over the car’s floor. He thought that now he would have to painstakingly wash out the whole car. But because the granules were absolutely dry and not sticky at all, he was able to wipe everything up down to the last granule. He was impressed: “Your mix is absolutely top notch and flows totally freely,” he said. This finally tipped the scales in favour of Amidro fully accepting our product.

In October 1970, we started with a production order of 20,000 tins of cough-relieving tea. Amidro called this product “Drosana Hustentee” (Drosana cough-relieving tea). By the end of 1970, the first 2,000 tins had already been sold. Orders arrived en masse in January and February. In the spring of 1971, we had already delivered the first 100,000 tins.

1970, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from “The Domaco Story” book

I got a completely revolutionary idea from my wife when I saw her making tea for our children from the age of two to three months and older over and over again every day. So I thought, why don’t you make instant teas for children? This would greatly simplify the daily procedure of infusing the teas. No sooner thought than done. I immediately set about developing just these kinds of teas…

I offered these teas to a company on the children’s market, which was very enthusiastic about them… At that time I had a huge advantage: I was able to price my products myself because I had no competition. I always told myself my calculation had to be right and of course I wanted to include something for the lean years… In the meantime, we had reached our upper capacity limit with our facilities. The technical problem was drying the granules, which always took eight hours. We produced 600 kg in each of the three ovens but that was no longer enough.

1971, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

In 1972, I suffered a serious ankle trauma fracture in a nasty skiing accident. I ended up in the hospital in Ilanz and later in Balgrist in Zurich. My eldest daughter Silvia was in England for a language study trip at the time. We immediately phoned her to tell her to come back because we really needed someone for the office. While I was a patient healing my foot at Balgrist, my daughter was looking after our business. And while she coped with the job very well as a commercially trained specialist, I was on the phone practically all day and kept in contact with my business partners from my hospital bed – after all, I wasn’t really ill. At that time, there were no private telephone lines in the hospitals; all phone calls had to be “plugged through” by the switchboard. Then one day an electrician came into my room and started laying cables. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he had to install a separate phone for me. I wanted to know who had ordered this and he referred me to the hospital management. There I was told that I was paralysing the hospital’s phone system with my phone calls. That’s why I would now get my own phone line, and it wouldn’t cost me anything. So I was able to run my then small three-man business online, as it were, from my hospital bed.

During this time, my closer employees were extremely committed to our company, above all my wife, my eldest daughter and our production manager, Mr Schürmann. They made sure that the “shop” ran smoothly. My daughter told me that when I was back on my feet, she wanted to leave the company. She had other plans than working in her parents’ business. But then it obviously became more and more interesting for her and she took on a lot of responsibility, so she didn’t want to leave. She remained loyal to our company and is now the managing director of Domaco.

1972, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

I wanted to really push the export business that I had cultivated in the past. At first I thought of expanding the market into the northern countries, which seemed to me to be particularly suitable as consumers of hot teas. I travelled all over Scandinavia as early as 1974 and successfully sold my Domaco teas and the already well-known cough sweets by the lorry load. Other countries were added later. This really made me want to open up other countries with my products and I decided to hire an export manager…

At the same time, a Swiss Export Organisation was founded in Switzerland with the initial aim of assisting willing exporters to tap into South East Asia. I became a member and soon we were participating in trips with product exhibitions. So it was off to Singapore and Hong Kong, and later to Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Malaysia. Business was good. We were able to deliver a 20-foot container of herbal sugar to Japan every month.

I was really interested in getting into the USA as well. After clarifying some matters, I travelled to the United States in 1980 with a trade specialist for the USA. There we met a German called Harms who was already working in trade. We made big plans for how to design the packs, advertising, sales, storage as well as the right name for the product. A beautiful bag was designed… Everything went really well at the start. A bit later though it transpired that very little had been sold and all the more was in storage. The US business turned into a fiasco with considerable losses… In a nutshell, the US business was a costly flop!

1974-1976, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

Soon after the success of the herbal healing tea, I started thinking about a new product, because just one seasonal article for the winter was not enough for me. We needed a thirst-quenching product for the summer. As a result, I developed a lemon tea and was able to get a major Swiss distributor interested in it as early as 1974… However, it was difficult to brew the tea by the spoonful in a glass. That set me on the path of making a sachet. I was not able to inspire the major distributor though. However, as I was supplying lemon tea in jars to a catering wholesaler at the same time, I was able to convince them in 1978 to buy the 100 gram sachet in 1978. They wanted to put this sachet in restaurants… We were already satisfied with the sales in the first year, which of course increased the demand from the restaurateurs. Other coffee roasters now also wanted this tea in 100 gram sachets, which we called “Eistee” (iced tea).

Due to the great demand in all the restaurants, retail also became curious and asked us if they could also have it, because at that time in 1982, iced tea was only available in the catering and hospitality industry. So we created a separate recipe for each customer, and everyone said that their iced tea was the best… We had moved to Lengnau in February/March 1982 just in time for the “summer of the century” to arrive. The demand in this wonderfully hot and long summer was so great that we couldn’t keep up with the production and bottling. But the buyers were understanding and even said that it was such a big hit that they could rely on it for a few years.

Although we produced day and night, the lorries had to queue up every morning.

However, now lots of liquid teas were also being produced in tetra packs. Just imagine the ecological nonsense that is going on here. If we were to transport the granulated tea we produce every day in liquid form, we would have to handle 100 lorries a day, whereas only eight to ten lorries are needed for the concentrated granulated tea to make yourselves. If the iced tea is carried home in tetra packs, the consumer has to lug ten kilograms of still, preserved water for ten litres of tea, whereas with granules they have to carry less than one kilogram and still enjoy freshly prepared tea.

1974, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

A small advertisement in the “Limmattaler” newspaper: a gentleman in Wettingen had land for sale in Lengnau. I had never heard of the Aargau municipality of Lengnau, and even when I learned that it was a municipality in the Surbtal, I was not much the wiser. “Just go and take a look at the land and the area,” the gentleman told me, “there is as much land for you as you need in Lengnau.” So I went to Lengnau and looked at the land in the industrial area. At that time, just one company was located there, otherwise it was greenfield far and wide. It seemed totally remote to me. “We’ll never get our people there,” were my concerns, “let alone our customers,” and I looked around for building land elsewhere.

I made another attempt with the Spreitenbach authorities. There would have been land for us there, but only in building rights and for 600 Swiss francs per square metre. Everyone had already built there, and that’s why the responsible municipal authorities only wanted to give the land away in building rights. Then I remembered the land in the Surbtal municipality. After taking a second look at it, I came to a more positive assessment. Strictly speaking, this Lengnau was not that remote: it is barely a 30-minute drive to the airport and about 15 minutes away from the motorway to Zurich and Bern. In addition, Lengnau is still in the access zone for 40-tonne lorries and in the border zone for German employees. Looked at from this perspective, the location had good transport links… As a result, we built Domaco’s first building with a total of 4,000 m2 in Lengnau from 1980 to 1982.

1982, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from “The Domaco Story” book

In the following years too, we were able to record above-average production figures, so as early as 1984 I was looking into an extension building again… The second new building was inaugurated in 1986. As I was concerned about too many empty production rooms, I bought the Belart company in 1985, which had already been producing fine confectionery for about 30 years. This company produced the very best jelly sweets on the market. The company also carried a very special exclusive in its range, a jelly sweet filled with various liqueurs called “Fruitbela”, which was and is unique. The production process is correspondingly tricky. I have always been interested in jelly sweets, which was also the reason why I bought the whole company with all the rights.

We soon started producing jelly sweets in Lengnau. This involves pouring the cooked jelly mixture into powder. Belart’s jelly casting plant opened up new possibilities for us to produce pastilles cast in powder, a branch of production that promised a great future. Today (2002), we have greatly expanded our product range in the powdered casting sector and produce all kinds of pastilles for Switzerland and many countries around the world. When I bought the Belart company back then, I was ridiculed and the company was called my hobby, but without this acquisition we would not be in this giant business of gummy and medicinal pastilles today (2002). I obviously have a good nose to anticipate good deals well in advance and, when the time comes, to grab them without hesitation.

1985, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

It was always very important to me to replace the old sweet production lines to be able to produce using state-of-the-art technology. Such plants achieve much higher outputs with fewer staff. Unfortunately, I was still missing that one really big customer. We managed to acquire a large German customer. I had no idea at the time what was in store for us. The orders came in early in the autumn in huge quantities.

In the first winter we were already able to produce about 400 tonnes, which was a massive amount for us at that time. I immediately saw that we couldn’t go on like this and started looking for new sweet making plants. I was then able to order three new sweet cutting and wrapping machines with a capacity of 1,000 sweets per minute from a machine factory I knew in Italy for the next winter... We quickly realised that we could not cope with these quantities at all. Soon we switched to shift work, twice a day for eight hours. When even these quantities were not enough, we prepared for three-shift operation. But this was sooner said than done. Where were we going to get the staff for this difficult task, because boiling and making sweets is not that easy and even less so with staff who have to be trained first. Also, only men were considered for this night shift because a lot of heavy weights had to be lifted. Everyone was instructed to encourage all their relatives and acquaintances to take on this job. And so gradually we got a team together that was capable of doing this heavy work under the most difficult conditions. Of course, I had to be there almost day and night, but that’s what I had wanted. As the poet says: “The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again...” For seven years we were able to produce for the large German customer. However, in the eighth year, a German competitor caught up with us and replicated our sweet. So I lost this wonderful large order. Now it was time to look for new customers again, which we had not managed to do to this extent until now.

In 1990 we had a production bottleneck for our instant products. Now, together with a food engineer, I was planning a whole new plant to produce even more and faster. We achieved this by no longer drying the wet granulate on a CONIDUR® plate, because it limited us due to the air temperature, so we developed a completely new system. We set up the first fully automatic tea granulate and drying plant.

1986, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

I had thought long and hard about whether I wanted to continue the long commute from Oetwil to Lengnau and back, but I calculated that I could make better use of this time, because I was on the road for a whole hour every day. So I looked around Lengnau and the surrounding area for a plot of land to build a detached house… We started the project with the ground-breaking ceremony on 8.8.1988 and we were able to move into the project at Christmas 1989…

The private planning and construction work together with the new high-performance instant production plant had placed more than the average stress on me. After every tough day at work, I had construction meetings in the evenings that sometimes lasted well into the night. I was, after all, already 63 years old at the time, and so the inevitable happened: my eyes, ears and especially my heart no longer wanted to play ball. After 1993, I was struck down with serious heart problems.

After this crisis, which lasted more than three years, I then dealt with handing over the active management to my daughter Silvia Huber. She had also been in the business for over 15 years at that time and had mastered everything down to the last detail. Over the years I had been able to establish that she was a brilliant and warm-hearted businesswoman. Unfortunately, this was also sooner said than done, as now a whole new set of situations came my way, in which I had to realise that it is hard to watch and no longer actively participate. After all, the company was my “baby”, which I had painfully brought into the world almost thirty years ago and raised to become a respectable company… As I look back here, I would like to thank all those who have always placed their trust in me, because there were multiple setbacks that were much tougher than one could have imagined.

1988-2002, Alfons Meier – Founder of Domaco

Excerpt from The Domaco Story book

Added value in everything we do determines the path we pursue with our customers and employees.

In 2004 we started the next stage of expansion and extension by investing in a complete casting plant for the production of the first soft gummy bears with added benefits such as minerals and vitamins. The path to full consumer acceptance was to take almost 10 years.

Soft, healthy gummy bears with natural fruits, with vitamins are now the trendsetters in food supplements around the world.

Indulgence and effect entirely in accordance with our founder’s ideas for pleasure and health in everyday life are of great importance to us.

2004 – Silvia Huber – Daughter of the founder and managing director

GMP and everything that goes with it has been a matter of course for many decades, right from the production of the first cough lozenges and instant cough-relieving teas. We received our GMP permit in 1975.

The constant development of technologies and our knowledge in this area is also deeply anchored in our DNA – in line with our founder’s philosophy and experience.

State-of-the-art technology for the production of pharmaceutical hardboiled lozenges is set up in an extension building in 2018. A comprehensive concept from delivery / identification / storage and production to blistering with the highest standards. This gives us a unique selling proposition for the future production of pharmaceutical lozenges.

2018 – Silvia Huber – Daughter of the founder and managing director

Courage, energy and a lot of innovative strength are what distinguish us and have been reinforced since 2015 when the 3rd generation of the family joined the company. I am thrilled that my children are ready to take on this challenge and tackle the future of Domaco in joint leadership.

We have been operating successfully as management teams since 2020 – dealing with innovation, products, customers and employees in an agile, direct and committed manner. Always in accordance with the motto “Nothing is impossible”.

I am happy that we as a family have the strength and the opportunity to carry our founder’s values into the future.

2022 – Silvia Huber, Vanessa Peterhans-Huber, Marc Huber

Daughter, granddaughter and grandson of the founder