Rieber & Søn

About Rieber & Søn

Rieber & Søn ASA was a Norwegian food manufacturer headquartered in Bergen, best known at home for the Toro brand of soups, sauces and bouillon cubes and the owner of the King Oscar sardine brand from 1996 to 2009.^[1][2] Founded in 1839 and held by the Rieber family for its whole life, it listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 1987 under the ticker RIE and by 2011 carried more than 25 brands in 12 countries, with factories in seven of them, revenue of NOK 4.3 billion and 2,900 employees.^[2][3][4] Orkla ASA agreed to buy the family's holding in August 2012, completed the purchase on 26 April 2013 and folded the business into Orkla Foods Norge that year.^[5][6][4]

Paul Gottlieb Rieber, born in Germany and raised in Bergen after the emigrant ship de Zee Ploeg was wrecked off the Norwegian coast in 1817, founded the firm in 1839 as a trading house and vinegar works.^[4] It remained a pure trading company until the Second World War and then grew into an industrial conglomerate spanning food, building materials, road asphalt and plastic film, forming Norsk Leca in 1954 and selling it to Norcem in 1972.^[2] Toro bouillon cubes and brown-sauce powder were launched in January 1946; clear meat soup followed in 1958 and vegetable soup in 1959, but it was Bergen fish soup in 1964 that decided the group to put the detergents down and build on food.^[4] Rieber & Søn merged with the building materials firms Jacob Neumann and Nodest Industrier in 1987 and floated on the Oslo Stock Exchange; it bought Denja in 1985, Norway Foods and Mr. Lee in 1996 and Nopal AS in 2003, and owned Minde Sjokoladefabrikk from 1995 to 2000.^[2][3] It entered Sweden in 1991, Czechoslovakia with Vitana in 1992, Poland in 1996, Denmark in 1997, Russia in 2000 and the Netherlands in 2002, and sold the road-surfacing, road-marking and building-materials businesses in 2000 to trade in food alone.^[2][3] Alongside Toro the portfolio held Denja, Mr. Lee, Vossafår, Vestlandslefsa, Geisha, Ming, Trondhjems and Sopps in Norway, Frödinge and Mrs. Cheng's in Sweden, K-Salat and Bähncke in Denmark, Vitana in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Delecta in Poland and Chaka in Russia.^[3][2]

The King Oscar brand came with the purchase of Norway Foods in 1996 and passed to King Oscar AS in 2009.^[1] The sellers in the Orkla deal were three Rieber family companies, AS Atlantis Vest with 44.38 per cent, Zee Ploeg AS with 43.54 per cent and Flu AS with 2.19 per cent, together the 90.11 per cent that Orkla ASA bought at NOK 67.45 a share through its wholly owned subsidiary Orkla Brands AS, followed by a mandatory offer and a compulsory acquisition of the minority.^[5][6] Rieber & Søn ASA was struck from the Oslo Stock Exchange on 30 May 2013, and Rieber & Søn, Stabburet, KiMs Norge and Sætre were wound up into Orkla Foods Norge during the same year.^[4] Orkla Brands AS was renamed ORKLA FOOD INGREDIENTS AS on 20 January 2015.^[7] AS Atlantis Vest, the family holding company that had been this group's largest shareholder and whose board Fritz Rieber chairs, itself took the name RIEBER & SØN AS on 27 September 2019 and trades from Kalfarveien 57A in Bergen as an investment company under organisation number 930131148, so the name now belongs to a different legal entity from the food group.^[8][6][2]