Janoschka magazine Linked_V8_2023

76 t o t e l l t h e t r u t h issue #8 © l i n k e d 77
Production has continuously improved since Jacob Christoph Rad was
granted an “imperial privilege” for his method of producing sugar cubes.
For all the technical innovations and inventions
designed to produce ever better
sugar cubes, ultimately it was the food
wholesaler Karl Hellmann who one hundred
years ago made sugar cubes into
what we have come to know and love
today. The trick was to buy ready-made
slabs of sugar directly from the sugar
factory and saw them into cubes. Well,
yes, but Hellmann’s real innovation was
actually to divide the sugar cubes into sets
of two and wrap them in little packets like
those your grandma loved to hoard. The
really pioneering aspect of this, though,
and the one that struck a chord with consumers
of the time, was that by virtue
of their wrapping, sugar cubes were no
longer just sweeteners, but with their
collectable pictures and names of cafes
suddenly vehicles for advertising. With
the addition of the banner, a simple
consumer product acquired a second
function. It communicated messages
that went far beyond the sugar itself:
memories of visits to restaurants whose
names would otherwise have been forgotten,
of holidays, special moments,
conversations.
The humble sugar cube thus became a pioneer of
modern marketing strategies. Who could have imagined
it? The catering industry of the Golden Twenties
was ecstatic. From the coffee house manager
in a summer resort to the owner of a variety theatre
in the city, the modern sugar cube with the advertising
space on the banner was a must have. Hellmann
built a whole business empire on this sales
idea. Hellma GmbH still exists today and is not only
"Europe’s largest producer and supplier of portionsized
packaging", as its website claims, but also the
only remaining company in Germany producing packets
of double sugar cubes.
One Viennese newspaper claimed in 1843 that
the new kind of sugar in cube form
would “mainly appeal to thrifty ladies”. Did that
also apply to the women who packaged it?