Dussmann Brand Guidelines: Munich 1963, a Berlin Foundation & “We care for more”

A Munich home-cleaning service, 1963.

The Dussmann Group starts with one founder and one city. German Wikipedia says Peter Dussmann founded the business in Munich in 1963 as Dussmann Heimpflegedienst GmbH, a cleaning company. The group’s own history page adds detail: the first trading name was “Pedus”, the first service was home cleaning for bachelor flats, and the start-up money came from the founder’s savings and a modest loan.

Office cleaning followed. The company says it began offering outsourced cleaning to offices and shops in 1966, signed its first hospital cleaning contract, with a medical centre in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in 1968, and opened its first foreign subsidiary, in Austria, the same year. Italy came in 1969; the company now calls it its biggest market, with some 23,400 people working there.

The range then widened. German Wikipedia says catering, security services and building technology were added in the 1970s and 1980s. The company dates its facility-management business to 1976, when a request for a package running from cleaning to security came from Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia and Brazil were the first markets. Catering for hospitals and care settings arrived in 1978 and corporate catering in 1982, and in those years the business traded abroad as Pedus International, according to its history page. In 1985 it took over the running of senior residences where it had already cleaned and cooked, and that became Kursana; the company puts the first group at six residences, as does the Kursana section of German Wikipedia, while the history section of the same article says seven.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought a large growth spurt in eastern Germany, the company says, followed by subsidiaries in Hungary in 1991 and the Czech Republic in 1992. In 1997 the head office moved from Munich to a new Dussmann building on Berlin’s Friedrichstraße.

Facility management, food and technical services.

Today the group is an umbrella over four businesses, and the facility-services arm carries the family name on its own. The company describes the Dussmann Group as the umbrella for the business of Dussmann Stiftung & Co. KGaA, with four sectors: Dussmann, Kursana, Dussmann KulturKindergarten and Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus. The Dussmann sector is the largest. Since a 2022 brand relaunch, which the company says marked its shift “from cleaning company to solution provider,” it has sold three service segments, Facility Management, Food Services and Technical Solutions, under the promise “We care for more.”

Much of the technical side was bought in. German Wikipedia and the company list Dresdner Kühlanlagenbau (DKA), a cooling and refrigeration firm founded in 1953 as a state-owned enterprise in East Germany and privatised in 1992, from 2013; the elevator builder HEBO, founded in 1972, from 2016; and the Irish electrical engineering firm STS, which German Wikipedia dates to 2018 and the company to 2019, the year it formed Dussmann Technical Solutions. The company adds Janus, an Austrian operating-theatre cleaning firm, the German refrigeration firm K.E.D. and the Polish building-services firm NetService in 2021, and a new Dussmann Elektrotechnik und Automation GmbH at the start of 2026.

The scale figures come from the company. Its group pages give about 72,000 employees in 23 countries, with the Dussmann sector in 21 of them, from Austria, Italy and Luxembourg to Saudi Arabia, where it trades as Dussmann Ajlan & Brothers, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. The hospitality trade site HOGAPAGE reported the same 72,000 figure from the group’s annual press conference in Berlin on 12 May 2026, where chief executive Wolf-Dieter Adlhoch presented a group strategy called “Road to 2030.” The company also places its Dussmann sector among the top ten facility-management providers in Europe, which is its own ranking.

Design and documentation.

Facility-services companies sell work that happens inside other people’s buildings, and the two in this guide describe it in short lists. In a July 2022 release, Atalian grouped its work under five headings: cleaning, security, maintenance and energy management, reception, and catering. EMCOR, a contractor that also maintains buildings, summed up its work in late 2025 with four verbs, saying it would serve customers that “build, power, service and protect facilities and critical infrastructure.”

The people who do the work are the service itself, and staff numbers are among the figures given for both companies. Atalian gave more than 123,000 employees in 35 countries in 2022, and La Tribune de l’Hôtellerie put it at about 63,000 in 15 countries in 2024; English Wikipedia gives EMCOR 40,400 employees in 2024. The photographs of staff at work, the uniforms and the workplace scenes that such companies publish belong to them, and this guide reproduces none of them.

Names matter because a name can tie a company to one service. TFN, the French cleaning firm founded in 1944, renamed itself Atalian in 2009 because, its chief executive told Le Figaro, the old name was too closely associated with cleaning. When Atalian and the British firm Servest formed a joint venture in 2016, it took both names, and Servest’s chief executive told the European Cleaning Journal that a customer should find the same look and feel in an office in London or Frankfurt as in Madrid or Paris.

Ownership can change quickly, as both companies here show, which makes corporate pages on owners and countries, and the annual and sustainability reports that sit beside them, part of how these firms present themselves. EMCOR sold its British business to OCS in December 2025, BIC Magazine reported, and Atalian agreed a recapitalisation with its creditors in June 2026. This guide sets each company’s own account beside dated press and marks what rests on the company’s word.

A foundation, a bookshop and a green wall.

Two things set Dussmann apart in its sector: its ownership and its shop. The founder withdrew from day-to-day management in September 2007, after 44 years, German Wikipedia says. Catherine von Fürstenberg-Dussmann chaired the supervisory board from April 2009, and since a restructuring at the start of 2011 she has chaired the board of trustees of the Peter Dussmann-Stiftung, the foundation body that German Wikipedia says took the supervisory board’s place. The company describes that six-person board as its “uppermost decision-making body.” At the 2026 press conference she called the group Berlin’s largest family company, HOGAPAGE reported.

The shop is Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus, which opened in the Friedrichstraße building in 1997 with books, music, film and stationery over five floors; German Wikipedia gives its sales floor as 7,500 square metres. The company calls it Germany’s largest media store and says Peter Dussmann had trained as a bookseller. A café on its second floor opened in July 2025, HOGAPAGE reported, and the group announced a second cultural space, “Dussmann – Kultur im KaDeWe,” on the fourth floor of the KaDeWe department store; the Berliner Morgenpost reported in November 2026 that Dussmann was now present there. At the Friedrichstraße building the French artist Patrick Blanc created a vertical garden in 2012, the company says.

The KulturKindergarten line began in 2011, when the first Dussmann KulturKindergarten opened in Berlin with a focus on bilingual, cultural and musical learning; the company says these childcare centres now run close to employers’ sites in five German states. Kursana, it says, operates at 95 locations.

For a design guide, Dussmann shows how one family name can stretch across cleaning teams, canteens, care homes and a bookshop, with a short promise, “We care for more,” holding them together. Compare WISAG, another German family-owned services group, and Sodexo, which also pairs food and facility services. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm red, a stone grey and an off-white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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