The factory was bought by an Italian group which has its own brand of yeast. The Alsa brand will now be made in Germany.
This is a historic turning point for the famous little pink sachet of Alsa yeast which has ensured the success of many cakes and the beautiful puffiness of the brioches of generations of pastry chefs and pastry chefs.
The Ludres factory in Meurthe-et-Moselle, where Alsa yeast sachets have been manufactured since 1972, was sold to the Italian group Newlat by the German Dr Oetker, who keeps the brand. The production of sachets has also been mainly relocated to Germany since 2021.
The new owner Newlat has promised to invest 20 million euros and keep the hundred employees to produce yeast under its Minuto brand, aiming for a turnover of 50 million euros by 2024, indicates The Parisian. This takeover saves the industrial tool and jobs, but signals the end of an emblematic local production.
A historic brand
The Alsa brand takes its name from Alsace, the region of origin of its founder. It all started in 1896. Emile Moench, a young Frenchman apprenticed to a baker in Vienna, discovered that his boss was using baking powder instead of baker’s yeast to make his buns rise. Back in his country, he began to manufacture this famous baking powder in his pink sachet in his cellar.
In 1897, he founded the Alsa company and moved to Nancy. His wife, Elisabeth, an energetic and hardworking woman, dreams one day of an Alsatian woman wearing a bonnet alongside a stork. It clicked, from then on the pink sachets took an Alsatian as their emblem. And the visual has hardly changed since!