Melitta Bentz: An Invention and a Company from the Kitchen

Why Melitta Bentz is worth a look today

Many businesses have solutions someone built for their own use: a jig in the workshop, a template in the office, a trick only one employee knows. Rarely does anyone ask whether it could become a product. Melitta Bentz asked exactly that question, in 1908, in her kitchen in Dresden.

This portrait pursues one question: What can be learned from Melitta Bentz's path about how a solution for one's own needs becomes a company? It relies only on publicly documented information, above all accounts by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, the Melitta Group, and the press.

To answer it, we first present the stages of her life, then the thinking model of user innovation. After that we weigh two readings and ask what owners can learn from them.

The stages: from blotting paper to family business

Amalie Auguste Melitta Liebscher was born in Dresden on 31 January 1873, the daughter of a publisher and bookseller. In 1897 she married Johannes Emil Hugo Bentz, who headed a department at a Dresden department store. The couple had two sons and a daughter (Berliner Zeitung; Encyclopedia.com).

At the time, coffee was mostly brewed with the grounds left in the cup, or poured through cloths and strainers that were hard to clean. According to the accounts handed down, Melitta Bentz perforated a vessel and lined it with blotting paper from her son's school exercise book. The coffee ran through clear, the grounds stayed in the paper, and the paper could be thrown away.

1. 20 June 1908: protecting the idea

   The Imperial Patent Office in Berlin registers a “coffee filter with filter paper” as a utility model, according to the Berliner Zeitung under number 347895.

2. 15 December 1908: founding

   Melitta Bentz registers a business in the commercial register. The starting capital is usually given as 73 pfennigs. Production first takes place in a room of the family apartment.

3. 1910 or 1911: recognition

   The filter receives a gold and a silver medal at the hygiene exhibition in Dresden. The sources give different years.

4. 1914 to 1918: war

   Paper shortages, a ban on coffee imports, and her husband's conscription interrupt filter production. The family gets by selling cardboard boxes.

5. 1929: move to Minden

   The company moves with 55 employees into a former chocolate factory in Minden, where it is still based today.

6. 1932: handover

   Melitta and Hugo Bentz retire and hand the company over to their sons Willy and Horst.

Melitta Bentz died on 29 June 1950. In that year, according to Encyclopedia.com, the company had sales of 4.7 million deutschmarks. According to the Berliner Zeitung, the group had around 5,900 employees in 2021.

The thinking model: von Hippel's user innovation

The economist Eric von Hippel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has devoted much of his research to an observation that contradicts the common idea of innovation. New products arise not only in manufacturers' development departments, but often among their users. He defines user innovation as the process by which individuals or firms create new products, services, or behaviors for their own use rather than for sale (von Hippel and colleagues 2023).

How widespread this is was shown by a representative survey of 1,173 adults in the United Kingdom (von Hippel, de Jong, and Flowers 2012). 6.1 percent had developed or modified a consumer product in the preceding three years, almost 2.9 million people when extrapolated. Their combined spending on this was more than 1.4 times as high as the spending of all UK companies on consumer product development.

The finding most important for this portrait comes next. Users almost never protected their solutions through intellectual property rights, and only 17 percent of the solutions spread to others at all. Most user innovations therefore stay where they arose. The authors conclude that manufacturers should reshape their development so that they find and build on such prototypes from their customers.

Many people solve a problem. A company only arises when someone sells the solution to others.

What Melitta Bentz did differently

In the light of the model, Melitta Bentz is a typical user innovator who did something atypical. She solved her own problem, like many others. Then she did three things that, according to the findings of von Hippel and colleagues, most user innovators do not do.

The classification is my own, not a statement by von Hippel about Melitta Bentz. But it shows where the difference lay: not in the idea, but in the half year between June and December 1908 in which a solution became an offering. How to test a new service in the market with little effort is described in the article Testing a New Service.

Also notable is how she started with few resources. A room in the apartment, the family as the first workforce, the sons helping after school. This approach resembles what the article Effectuation describes as a principle of experienced founders: start with the means you have instead of waiting for those you would need.

An everyday analogy: many home cooks have a recipe their friends praise. A restaurant only comes of it if someone takes the step from praise to price and asks whether strangers would pay for it.

The Nazi era and the sons

The company's history includes a phase that no longer took place under Melitta Bentz herself, but in her family business. In 1932 the majority had passed to the sons. During the Nazi era, according to the Berliner Zeitung, the company rose to become a National Socialist model business and used forced laborers. Horst Bentz was a member of the SS. A company newsletter from 1938 documents discriminatory measures against Jews. After the war he was fined.

The Melitta Group itself describes the years 1933 to 1945 as a dark chapter in its history. In 1999 it paid into the German industry's compensation fund for former forced laborers and into the federal foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (Berliner Zeitung).

Two readings: inventor or entrepreneur?

The first reading tells the story as that of an inventor. A housewife is annoyed by coffee grounds, has a brilliant idea, and becomes famous. This version is vivid and has often been told in advertising. It puts the weight on the idea at the kitchen table.

The second reading tells the story as that of an entrepreneur. The idea was the smallest part. What mattered were protecting the idea, registering the business, selling, surviving the First World War with a stopgap business, the move with 55 employees, and the orderly handover to the next generation.

I consider the second reading the more revealing one, without disputing the first. Von Hippel's research shows that ideas for one's own needs are common. What is rare is the step after. Melitta Bentz is remarkable not because she solved a problem, but because she protected the solution, sold it, and carried it through crises. A similar path from everyday work to a company is shown in the portrait of Margarete Steiff, a different form of selling in the portrait of Estée Lauder.

What owners in the Mittelstand can learn

Three conclusions can be drawn from the portrait that apply to businesses today.

• Make your own solutions visible: Once a year, ask your team which jigs, templates, or procedures someone has built for themselves. Some of them are worth more to customers than to the business.
• Protect early where it pays off: Melitta Bentz had her idea registered within a short time. For a new solution, check whether a trademark, utility model, or name should be protected. What to consider with names is described in Name, Domain, Trademark Protection. This is not legal advice.
• Arrange the handover early: The founder handed over to her sons in 1932, during her lifetime and in an orderly way. How to prepare succession within the family is described in Succession Within the Family, by Employees, or by Outsiders.

Conclusion: what does Melitta Bentz's path teach?

The guiding question was what can be learned from Melitta Bentz's path about how a solution for one's own needs becomes a company. The answer lies in the half year after the idea. Solutions for one's own use are common, as the survey by von Hippel and colleagues shows. Most stay where they arose. Melitta Bentz protected her solution, registered a business, and sold.

Her path also shows that a company has a history of its own beyond its founder, including dark years. For an owner today a simple lesson remains: the good idea is the beginning. The company begins with the question of who other than yourself would pay for it.