And once again the chocolate world has an important birthday!
The world-famous Lindor chocolate turns 75! Happy Birthday.
We're celebrating this chocolate bar in detail this year - the even more famous baubles actually only appeared as a Christmas marketing gimmick in 1969, in which the Lindor chocolate recipe was simply shaped into a kind of Christmas bauble that you could hang on the tree. At that time, the Lindor in bar form had already been available since 1949 - but after Christmas 1969, customers still wanted the balls and so the Lindor balls developed into the most important flagship of the Lindt & Sprüngli brand.
We would like to go into the history of Lindor chocolate bars here. Was it also a revolution? No!
In 1879, Rodolphe Lindt from Bern invented melt-in-the-mouth chocolate - he kept the secret to himself for 20 years and then sold it to Sprüngli in Zurich, whereupon Lindt & Sprüngli was created. This chocolate surpassed anything that had ever existed before, but it soon became apparent how to make a chocolate that was tender and melted in the mouth.
Like today, people kept a close eye on the competition and if someone had a great idea, they tried to improve it with their own ideas.
And so the Lindor was not an invention of Lindt, but only Lindt & Sprüngli managed to make this filled premium chocolate world famous.
So where does the Lindor originate? For example with the Cailler Frigor, whose 100th birthday was not officially celebrated last year - except for us. We now want to investigate this question here and, as so often, Urs Berger played a very large part in the research, to whom I would like to thank him very much.
The model of FRIGOR and the more successful imitator product LINDOR go back to Jules Séchaud from Montreux - Séchaud invented the filled chocolate bar in 1913.
The fine chocolate was given the name “CREMOR” and set standards that are still valid today: the dominant color of the packaging is red and the name of the product ends with “…or”! Ten years later, the company “Peter Cailler Kohler Schweizer Chocolate AG” introduced FRIGOR. The filled chocolate from the F.-L. Cailler developed into an enduring classic.
Trademark registrations from 1923 from the Swiss Commercial Gazette First FRIGOR packaging from 1923, exhibited at Maison Cailler
In 1928, the packaging received the FRIGOR logo, which is still valid today, and at the same time its basic color changed to red. As a result, numerous chocolate factories introduced filled chocolates in red packaging or wraps:
- Pagor (Nestlé), 1936
- Ginador, (Jowa, Migros), 1938
- Denn-or (Denner), 1938
- Villora (Vilars), 1923 name, later with chocolate filling
- Lindor (Lindt & Sprüngli), 1949
- Pralinor (Frey, Migros), 1950
- Aristor (Halba, Coop), 1967
- Rastor (Rast, Denner), 1976
Filled chocolates became increasingly important from the 1930s onwards and displaced dark fondant chocolates from the premier class. Other Swiss producers also offered filled chocolates in red wrappers, but omitted the ending “or”:
- LA-DO-RE (Suchard), 1933
- TERESINA (Tobler), 1934
- TORINO (Camille Bloch), 1948
The original from 1913, the “CREMOR”, steadily lost market share after the Second World War. After the Séchaud chocolate factory in Montreux was closed, the Chocolat Tobler company in Bern acquired the “CREMOR” trademark rights in 1973, which had the filled chocolate in its range until the 1980s.
It wasn't until 1949 that Lindt & Sprüngli introduced the LINDOR. At Christmas 1969, the LINDOR was offered for the first time in ball form for the Christmas tree. The filled balls were a hit, so they were soon permanently included in the standard range. Towards the end of the 1970s, the international breakthrough of the LINDOR balls began, which eventually developed into the most important product of the Lindt & Sprüngli chocolate factories. The unstoppable success of the LINDOR balls is largely due to the successful Ernst Tanner, who started at Lindt & Sprüngli in 1993 as President of the Board of Directors and now leads the international group as Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Today the FRIGOR is only a shadow of the LINDOR, and only in Switzerland.
Because with the success of the LINDOR balls, sales at the Lindt & Sprüngli AG chocolate factories grew from 345 million to almost 5 billion between 1975 and 2022!
Are you now in the mood for Lindor chocolate? And would you like to order a Frigor too? Simply click on the respective products or continue surfing on our Pages. For B2B customers we recommend our business area
Have fun
Kind regards, your Swiss Chocolate World
