Brief Founding History

The Häußler & Sauter company was founded in 1949 by Inge Sauter and has been family-owned for more than 70 years - today in the third generation.

The starting point of a successful company development was a small amount of coffee and tea which, shortly after the end of WWII and before the German currency reform, was very valuable in a time of scarce consumer goods. The company's founder began by portioning the goods for retail sale, although coffee was soon to prove unsuitable for portioning. The success of initial manufacturing and sales efforts with tea was much better. Here, a multifaceted world opened up with great opportunities for development - at first, it was only black tea, but soon herbal and fruit infusions were added. Inge Sauter raised the initial financing by working at night doing bookkeeping for skilled craft businesses.

As is so often the case, the company's history began with pure manual labor. The tea was first weighed with pharmacist's scales, then placed in bags manually formed from gauze fabric, including a holding thread and label.  Finally, the teabags were closed with aluminum caps. Soon the son of the founder, Gerhard Klar - at that time still a schoolboy - built the first simple devices for sealing bags of filter paper and for dosing the tea. Later, his first constructed machines took over the portioning and packaging of the meanwhile already well-known tea specialties.

The design of all HST tea bag machines has been developed to this day by Dr. Gerhard Klar, the current senior, who has been in the business for 7 decades (!), in the company's mechanical engineering division. The machines are used in the company's own two production plants as well as sold to tea packers all over the world.

As early as the mid-1960s, the first medicinal teas were filled by machine in Kressbronn and, with the expert assistance of the pharmacist Prof. P. Bauer from Isny/Allgäu, medicinal tea formulations were created, some of which are still used today without any changes. These include the now well-known and widely used mixture for fennel-anise-caraway, the basis of which was taken from old herbal books:
A company of tradition and progress.