Zertus GmbH

About Zertus GmbH

Zertus GmbH is the operating holding company of a Hamburg food group, entered at Amtsgericht Hamburg as HRB 9518 and trading under the VAT number DE118582196.^[1] Zuckerraffinerie Tangermünde Fr. Meyers Sohn Holding GmbH holds its shares and is named as its shareholder in register publications up to 30 March 2026; the legal entity itself was created on 7 July 1961.^[2][3] The group presents itself as a family-led network with roots in 1826 and works in four fields — love brands and food production, distribution, end-to-end services and global growth investments — with companies and holdings that include Dextro Energy, Bio Zentrale, Pulmoll, Mondamin, Kinnerton, Lir Chocolates, Humdinger and Importhaus Wilms.^[4]

The business goes back to the sugar refinery Friedrich Theodor Meyer founded in Tangermünde in 1826; his sons took it over in 1865 as Zuckerraffinerie Tangermünde Fr. Meyers Sohn, it exported to England and overseas from 1882 and made chocolates and pralines under the Feodora mark from 1910, and it was the largest refinery in Europe until the end of the Second World War, when the Soviet occupation authorities expropriated and largely dismantled it in 1946.^[5] The company was refounded in Hamburg in 1949 and went back to making chocolate, bought the Bremen chocolate maker Hachez in 1987 and sold it again in 2000, and turned itself into a holding company during the 1980s.^[5] The change of name from Zuckerraffinerie Tangermünde Fr. Meyers Sohn GmbH to ZERTUS GmbH was entered in the Hamburg register on 5 July 2002, with a share capital then of €21.6 million, raised to €22.5 million in 2006.^[2] The German National Library's authority record for this company, GND 3051398-4, which the Wikidata item Q196767 gives as the same corporate body, records it as founded in 1826 by Friedrich Theodor Meyer, taken over by his sons in 1865, refounded in Hamburg in 1949 and renamed Zertus GmbH in 2002.^[6] It bought Dextro Energy from Unilever on 5 March 2005, when the Krefeld business employed around 160 people,^[7] and in 2012 acquired the British Zetar Group, which brought Kinnerton Confectionery, Lir Chocolates and Humdinger into the group.^[5] The register gives its corporate purpose as the production, processing and distribution of food and beverages, the trade in goods of any kind, and the acquisition and management of shareholdings at home and abroad.^[2]