A Munich shop, a widow and a coffee department.

Dallmayr dates itself to 1700. The company says the first record of the business that would later bear the name Dallmayr appears that year, when the Munich merchant Christian Reitter ran a trading business; German Wikipedia treats Reitter’s shop as the precursor of the present firm. Around 1870 it passed to Alois Dallmayr, a merchant from Wolnzach in the Hallertau, who gave it the name it still carries. German Wikipedia describes the business he ran as a colonial-goods shop.

In 1895 Alois Dallmayr sold the house and shop to Anton Randlkofer, the company says — German Wikipedia names Anton and his wife Therese as the buyers — and the new owners kept the established name. Anton died two years later, and the company says his widow then ran the business, which it calls a sensation at the time. Under Therese Randlkofer, the company says, Dallmayr became a royal Bavarian purveyor around 1900 and counted the German imperial court and fourteen other European royal and princely houses among its customers. In 1912 the shop on Dienerstraße was more than doubled in size; German Wikipedia, citing the Neudeutsche Bauzeitung of 1913, names the Munich architects Eugen Hönig and Karl Söldner, with sculpture by Georg Albertshofer inside and Julius Seidler on the façade, and gives the reopening date as 23 November 1912.

Coffee came later. The company says that in 1931, in the hard times after what it calls Black Friday, Hermann Randlkofer looked for a new line of business and chose coffee. In 1933 Konrad Werner Wille, a 19-year-old coffee specialist from Bremen, set up a specialist coffee department in the delicatessen; the company says he bought the green coffee, stood at the roaster himself and organised sales, and it dates the birth of “Dallmayr Kaffee” as a brand to that year. German Wikipedia, citing an interview with the author Lisa Graf, says Dallmayr began offering coffee only around 1930. The Stammhaus was destroyed in the war and rebuilt in the 1950s, the company says, with Paul Randlkofer and Wille leading the reconstruction.

prodomo, vending and five roasteries.

The coffee business grew through two channels in the 1960s, the company says: vending, with the founding of the Alois Dallmayr Automaten-Service, and a new blend. Wille created prodomo, which the company says quickly won over coffee drinkers across Bavaria; it now calls prodomo its top brand, alongside capsa and Crema d’Oro. English Wikipedia says the first vending customer was the Munich carmaker BMW, which put hot-drinks machines in its production halls in the 1960s. Both Wikipedia editions say television advertising for prodomo made the Stammhaus coffee counter the best-known department in the shop, and that coffee there is still weighed on beam scales, as in the advertisements.

In 1985 the coffee business was spun off into a subsidiary, Alois Dallmayr Kaffee OHG, which German Wikipedia describes as a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent company, Alois Dallmayr KG, and as the group’s largest business. Dallmayr added other roasters: Heimbs Kaffee of Braunschweig in 1986, which Wikipedia calls the largest and oldest roaster in Lower Saxony, Azul Kaffee in 1997 and, German Wikipedia says, Schirmer Kaffee of Dortmund in 2013.

On where the coffee is roasted, the company says more than 80,000 tonnes a year are roasted “in our own roasteries in Germany.” German Wikipedia, citing the company, names five sites: Munich, Berlin, Braunschweig, Bremen and Dortmund; an older figure in English Wikipedia gives 57,000 tonnes at the same five sites. Capsules are a documented exception: German Wikipedia, citing the Aargauer Zeitung and WirtschaftsWoche (October 2020), says that since 2018 Dallmayr capsules have also been made by Delica, a Migros company, and by a roaster belonging to the Aldi group.

A delicatessen as a coffee brand.

The seven brands in this group all roast coffee, and they come from five European countries: Segafredo Zanetti and Kimbo from Italy, Julius Meinl from Austria, Tchibo and Dallmayr from Germany, Douwe Egberts from the Netherlands, and Paulig from Finland. Coffee brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from vacuum packs on a supermarket shelf to espresso poured in a café under the roaster’s own sign, and a single company can work at both ends at once.

A coffee brand’s identity is usually carried less by a place of growth than by a blend, a pack and the cup it promises, because the beans inside will have been grown a long way from where the name on the front was roasted. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, where its coffee is bought, and where it is actually roasted and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its coffee comes from and where it is roasted — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Family-owned again since 2015.

For three decades the coffee arm had an outside partner. Nestlé took a stake in Alois Dallmayr Kaffee OHG — 51 percent according to German Wikipedia, 50 percent according to English Wikipedia — which was reduced to 25 percent in 2003. In July 2015 Dallmayr bought back Nestlé’s remaining shares, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, returning the coffee business to the family-owned group; English Wikipedia adds that sales cooperation with Nestlé was to continue.

Today the company describes itself as family-owned and led by the two personally liable partners of the parent company, Florian Randlkofer and Johannes Dengler. Florian Randlkofer, the fifth generation, succeeded his father Georg Randlkofer in 2015, and in June 2024 Wolfgang Wille, the son of Konrad Werner Wille, handed his role to Johannes Dengler, the company says. It gives a staff of about 4,800, more than 100,000 coffee, cold-drink and snack machines in 18 countries, and about 2.8 million visitors a year at the Stammhaus on Dienerstraße. German Wikipedia, citing the group accounts published in the Bundesanzeiger, gives revenue of €1.16 billion for the 2022/23 financial year. In October 2025 Dallmayr opened a Coffee Club next to the delicatessen, serving house roasts, specialty coffee and matcha drinks, German Wikipedia says, citing the company.

For a design guide, Dallmayr shows a supermarket coffee brand that still carries the name of a single Munich delicatessen. Compare Tchibo, another German coffee name, and Melitta. For this guide we use a roast brown, gilt and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dallmayr’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.