Company visit at Kräuter Mix
How are tea blends actually made? Where do the spices that we sprinkle over our food come from? And why does it always smell like herbs on the stretch of road between Wiesentheid and Geiselwind? These questions were answered during a company tour of the Kräuter Mix Abtswind site for employees of Sparkasse Mainfranken Würzburg. The visit was part of a team building exercise for managers of the financial institution. However, before the guests were able to dive into the world of herbs, they had to dress in a protective coat and a hair net – as is the norm in any food processing facility – and also wash and disinfect their hands.
Production managers Axel vom Berg and Martin Albert took the Sparkasse employees, who work for regional director Heiko Därr, on a one-and-a-half-hour tour of the spacious halls, where 140 employees work across three shifts on 34 production lines spread over three floors to process almost 30,000 metric tons of dried herbs, vegetables and spices per year. While bell peppers are cleaned and cut at one facility, ginger root is ground into powder a few doors down and exotic ingredients are blended into a fruit tea just next door.
In order to really hammer home the impact of the visit, managing partner Bernhard Mix followed up the tour with a presentation showcasing facts and figures about the fourth-generation family business from Abtswind, which supplies the global market with plant-based raw materials from aniseed to onions as a supplier for the food, pharmaceutical and pet food industries. In 2021, the 500 employees achieved a record turnover of 140 million euros with an export rate of almost 50 percent. Bernhard Mix also provided insights into the management of a medium-sized business, which was an interesting talking-point for the managers at Sparkasse.
