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“Mister Pommes Chips” Hans-Heinrich Zweifel died at the age of 87. Last Monday “he fell asleep peacefully as a result of a heart condition,” according to an obituary. The old pioneering Doubt and Chips booster is no longer.
“We are losing a popular and comic patron,” reads the obituary. He “played a key role in building the company and developed and shaped it with great commitment, passion and a wealth of ideas.”
Hans-Heinrich Zweifel is the founder of the Zweifel empire. He was the boss from the beginning and ran the company since 1958. In the beginning, everything was still done by hand. Two tons of potatoes are peeled, cut, fried and packed every day. The result: 500 kilos of chips.
Red numbers at the beginning
The first fully automatic manufacturing plant arrived just two years later. It produced 180 kilos of chips per hour. The investment was huge. So large, in fact, that the company was in deficit for a long time. But success came over time. The pioneer of French fries became one of the richest Swiss. The business magazine “Bilanz” places the family assets between 250 and 300 million Swiss francs.
The anecdote about how Zweifel snuck into a foreign company site in Agno TI in 1962 is legendary. He approached the window with a pull-up and spied on the competition. He wanted to dispute the business with the Hönggers. Doubt discovered a large fryer and about a thousand metal stands. He prepared for battle and won.
So far, no one has managed to break the domain of doubt in Switzerland. The company, run by Zweifel’s son Christoph (51), now has an annual turnover of more than 240 million francs. The most popular type of French fries is the classic one in red: paprika.
Hansheiri Industrial Spy
“Hansheiri” Zweifel managed the company’s operating fortune until the 1990s. His path to becoming the nation’s chip king was a fluke. He was 25 years old when he founded Zweifel Pomy-Chips AG as a newly qualified ETH agronomist.
A relative of his experimented with the American snack on a farm in Katzenrüti ZH. The whole neighborhood was in love with the slices. But a sudden heartbeat ended his life. Hans-Heinrich Zweifel took over the orphan potato sausage.
At his father’s cider factory, the young entrepreneur started playing with four deep fryers. He found that only certain varieties tasted good. The fact that I had to heat the warehouse, so the slices stayed shiny while frying. And he booked his honeymoon in America to do a bit of industrial espionage in the chip factories there. Just as he did later in Ticino with a very calm base.
