Verena Bahlsen crumbles away. Werner M. Bahlsen’s daughter is leaving the biscuit company’s management board in order to “go surfing” for a few weeks – and she has good reasons for doing so. In an emotional farewell letter shared by the 29-year-old on Linkedin, she reveals why she is quitting.
Bahlsen is one of Europe’s leading pastry manufacturers and claims to have around 2,600 employees in more than 80 countries. The main location has been Hanover since 1889. The patriarch of the cookie dynasty, Werner M. Bahlsen, had already retired as CEO in 2018; daughter Verena Bahlsen joined the company as an active partner in the same year. But it has been known for years that there is a crunch in the gearbox. This was evidenced by multiple reshuffles in the executive floor, but also differences of opinion within the family about the direction of the company. She aimed for a rethinking of the biscuit group, wanted to put it on more sustainable pillars. Last week it was announced that the company had brought Alexander Kühnen into the group as the new managing director. It will start in 2023. Verena Bahlsen, on the other hand, is giving up and leaving at the end of the year “for personal reasons” in order to devote herself to projects outside of Bahlsen from now on.
For Verena Bahlsen it’s a terrible end. Because, as she now revealed, her time in the company was anything but a bed of roses. In her parting words to her colleagues, she writes that she was often embarrassed when they saw her in moments of fear, when she was overwhelmed or insecure. And she gets even more specific: “I was standing in a German wheat field with our CEO and had a panic attack. I cried in many meetings. I was sometimes rude or impatient, I interrupted people when I should have been listening, or I was cold and hard when I should have stayed soft.” Nevertheless, her colleagues gave her space in her “struggle for authenticity in this role”, supported her and taught her a lot. Thank you for that.
Her departure is only surprising at first glance. Years ago, she was said to have ambitions for the top position, but things never really went well for her at the pastry manufacturer. She wasn’t to blame herself. Verena Bahlsen got the first real scandal in 2019. When she spoke on stage at the Online Marketing Rockstars Festival, she was 26 years old, had dropped out of college and was not stingy with provocative statements. “I’m a capitalist. I own a quarter of Bahlsen and I’m happy about it. It should continue to belong to me. I want to make money and buy sailing yachts with my dividends and stuff like that,” said the co-heiress at the time. She owns a quarter of the family empire. The “Business Insider” later judged that it took Bahlsen exactly 18 seconds “to ruin her prospects of succeeding to the throne in her family’s 545 million euro biscuit empire”.
Because the Shitstorm was not long in coming. She was accused, among other things, that she sometimes owed her wealth to forced laborers during National Socialism. In a “Bild” interview, she then talked head and neck when she explained that the company was not guilty of anything in this regard. But that wasn’t true. Their controversial statements caused immense damage to the company’s image. (More about this here) At the beginning of 2020, then the bang. It became known that the company is looking for an external managing director. A huge step for the biscuit maker, until now this role has always been filled by family members.
Verena Bahlsen didn’t really fit into the company from the start. She wanted to be something like a good capitalist. “I think now is the most exciting time to make money improving the world,” she once said in a Capital interview. Instead of just continuing at Bahlsen as usual, she had visions and wanted to offer alternative nutrition. In 2017 she founded a subsidiary. The “Herrmann’s” in Berlin is a healthy restaurant with an attached organic shop and management consultancy for companies that want to implement sustainable concepts in the food industry. And now? A question that Verena Bahlsen cannot answer herself. She has no idea what to do next. “I decided to take some time and learn about all the different ways people tell stories and inspire each other,” she writes. She talks about wanting to do an internship on a film set and the opportunity to do freelance brand building. “So if someone has a job for me, please let me know,” said Bahlsen. “But maybe first you guys will give me a few weeks to go surfing, sit on the beach and be scandalously unproductive.”
Source: Linkedin, Business Insider 1, Business Insider 2, with material from the dpa
