Nebona Gewürze: A company with a long history
Humble beginnings as a grocery store
The history of Nebona Gewürze starts more than 125 years ago, when Georg Neeb opened a grocery store in Pasing in 1893. “Neeb Kolonialwaren” was a very special enterprise right from the beginning, not just a normal grocery, but more like a small version of Dallmayr, a delicatessen with a superior range of goods. Business went so well that the residential and office building was extended in 1914 and the “Gebrüder Neeb” wholesale food business was added in 1925. From then on, it was primarily the founder’s son Friedrich who took the business affairs in hand. In 1932, at the age of 34, Friedrich was forced to manage the company business alone when both his parents and his brother Georg died within a few months of each other.
The post-war years – first steps in the spice trade
During World War Two, Friedrich Neeb hoarded 100,000 bottles of wine, which he stored secretly in a railway underpass. “Wine holds the key to the future, and people will always drink,” Neeb believed. And sure enough, this foundation enabled him to resume his business activities immediately after the war. He had also kept five sacks of pepper, five of cloves and five of allspice under the loading ramp of his shop, and so it was that the Pasing-based grocery started its trade with spices. The spices were packed by hand in little pouches printed with a yellow camel. The business with the exotic goods went very well right from the start, for spices were hard to come by at that time. Neeb also engaged farmers all around Munich to grow herbs for him. In those first days, the annual yield of peppermint alone was 50 to 80 metric tons per year. Friedrich Neeb was no longer just a grocer, he quickly gained a reputation as a resourceful entrepreneur and an expert on spices.
By 1949 the grocery shop had become too small, and Neeb built a spice mill on Landsberger Strasse in Pasing with his new business partner Lothar Wolff. As well as expanding the Nebona spice business, Neeb also sold “Bodenstolz” floor paint, fabric dyes, Easter egg dyes and the pain killer “Asaka”. But the spice mill rapidly took up so much of his time and energy that he soon gave up the other branches of his business.
Expansion with spice mill
In 1969 the food wholesaler and the spice mill had again outgrown its premises, and at the age of 69, with the support of his business partners Lothar Wolff and Nikolaus Bichlmayer, Neeb invested in the construction of a new company building. A modern spice mill, a filling station and a food wholesaler attached to a cash & carry hypermarket were built on a 5,500 square metre plot of land in Gräfelfing. The company had 180 employees.
Friedrich Neeb died in 1983 at the age of 85. By then he had already passed on his company shares and management duties to his partners. In the meantime, it is their children who own the shares.
Moving into modern times
The cash-and-carry was closed down in 1987/88 and the now vacant premises were let. From then on, Gebrüder Neeb GmbH concentrated mainly on expanding Nebona Gewürze. Over the years that followed, the company successfully evolved into a renowned spice specialist carrying high-quality products. Quality and environment management systems, various certifications (e.g. to the International Food Standard IFS), a risk analysis system and membership of the Bavarian Environment Pact all go to show that Nebona Gewürze is a thoroughly modern enterprise.
It was simply the next logical step when Nebona Gewürze started to integrate organically grown products in its range. The company has been supplying high-quality organic products primarily to the bread making industry since 1993. Nebona has been certified as an organic producer since 1999. And in 2008 the new organic range for retail traders was presented at the Bio-Fach trade fair in Nuremberg. Our innovative products BuKross®, Nebona rice syrup and spelt syrup, and our dry pesto blends met with a particularly good response. BuKross®, the delicious, healthy buckwheat snack mixture, was patented in 2009 and registered as a European brand name in 2010.