German entrepreneur who headed the family business, the Knorr food manufacturing company (known for its ready-made soups and cooking ingredients, and today part of the Unilever group). Carl Heinrich Eduard Knorr was the fourth born of the five children of the company founder Carl Heinrich Theodor Knorr (1800–1875).
Carl Heinrich Eduard Knorr completed a commercial apprenticeship and a first year at two Heilbronn companies. He then went to Le Havre for three years and to Liverpool for one year. In 1866 he joined the paternal food company. Four years later, his younger brother Alfred followed him. The two brothers came from France with the idea of ??making soup preparations from dried ingredients.
After the death of their father, the company founder, in 1875, Carl Heinrich Eduard and his brother Alfred (1846-1895) took over the company management.
They laid out experimental gardens to improve the soup ingredients and, with the construction of a mill in the southern district in 1884, laid the foundation stone for the company’s long-standing premises (today at Knorrstrasse 1). The 1860s gave the company a tremendous upswing. In addition to soup preparations, it produced dried vegetables, canned military products and the well-known Knorr oatmeal. In 1885, packing stations were opened in Austria and Switzerland in order to avoid an increase in import duties in these countries. Knorr ready-made soups were not only offered as powder in bags, but from 1886 as bars, from 1889 in sausage form (the legendary Erbswurst pea sausage), in 1897 as tablets and in 1910 in the form of soup cubes.
After the death of his brother Alfred in 1895, Carl Heinrich Eduard Knorr took over sole management of the company. In 1897 he had the Villa Carl Knorr, also known as Villa ‘Lerchenburg’, built by the Berlin architects Johannes Vollmer and Heinrich Jassoy at Gutenbergstrasse 51 in Heilbronn.
Carl Heinrich Eduard Knorr was married twice and had four children. He died on 8 May 1921 in Heilbronn at the age of 78.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)