Tinware, soup extract and a manor farm south of Vienna.

Inzersdorfer takes its name from Inzersdorf, once a village on the southern edge of Vienna and now part of the city’s 23rd district, Liesing. The company dates its first factory to around 1870, when, it says, Ignaz Eisler and Adalmar von Breden set up a plant for preserves and soup extracts in the former manor farm of Schloss Inzersdorf. It calls 1873 its “birth year,” and that is the date the City of Vienna’s Wien Geschichte Wiki gives for the founding, by the Eisler and Breden families, of what it describes as the first Austrian military canning factory. German Wikipedia’s article on the founding firm also gives 1873, and says a new, larger plant opposite Inzersdorf’s parish church followed in 1877.

The early business was military. The Wien Geschichte Wiki, drawing on Felix Czeike’s historical lexicon of Vienna, says the factory first made tinware for the army, including cartridge cases and caps, as well as tins that were filled on site with vegetables or meat, sealed and sterilised; food gradually became the main product. German Wikipedia, citing a 1901 description of the district, lists meat, vegetable, soup and coffee preserves for the imperial army, and says that in peacetime the plant canned or dried vegetables such as asparagus, peas, beans and mushrooms and made provisions for travellers, hunters and ships. Shortly after its founding the firm was allowed to call itself the “k.k. exclusively privileged preserves and soup-extract factory Ig. Eisler & Comp.”

German Wikipedia says that around the turn of the century the business passed to the president of the Anglo-Austrian Bank, and that the group it then belonged to had plants in Poland, Italy, Hungary and Spain before it fell apart with the monarchy around 1918, leaving only the Inzersdorf works. The Wien Geschichte Wiki says more than 1,000 people worked there during the First World War, and that in the difficult 1930s it switched to cheap staple foods such as pasta and jams.

Voith, Pecher and the camping years.

Family ownership returned at the end of the 1930s. The company and German Wikipedia say Hermann Voith and his sister Else Pecher took over in 1939; the Wien Geschichte Wiki, which says a lending bank had run the business for a time, dates the return to family hands, under director Max Petrusen, to 1937–38. The factory worked for military supply during the Second World War. At the war’s end, the company says, it was plundered first by the hungry population and then confiscated by the Red Army, and when the Soviet troops left at the end of 1947 little more than empty walls remained.

The rebuilding shaped the brand that exists today. Inzersdorfer set out to make shelf-stable foods as branded goods for households and catering, and the company and the Wien Geschichte Wiki both say production rose tenfold between 1950 and 1970, helped, according to the company and German Wikipedia, by the postwar wave of travel and camping. In 1980 the firm received the Austrian state award (Staatliche Auszeichnung), which carries the right to use the federal coat of arms in business, German Wikipedia says. A 2005 book by Martina Pecher, Das Dosenwunder (“The Tin-Can Miracle”), tells the story of the works between family ownership and globalisation.

The range today covers ready meals in tins, jars and trays, soups, savoury bread spreads and Sugo pasta sauces. The company names goulash soup, semolina-dumpling soup and liver-dumpling soup among its best-loved soups, and sells a plant-based sauce under the name Pure Green and spicier dishes under a Chili Kick sub-brand. Its ready meals are preserved by heating alone, the company says, and it describes itself, citing NielsenIQ retail data for 2025, as Austria’s market leader in unrefrigerated ready meals.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Austria or Switzerland: Zipfer, Gösser, Inzersdorfer, Rivella, Emmi, Kägi and Rauch. Austrian and Swiss food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made 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 products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Linz food group and a brand without its old factory.

Until 2003 the business was run by the Voith and Pecher families. That year it was sold to Vivatis Holding AG, the Linz-based food group, which the company says bought 100 percent and kept the brand in Austrian hands; Maresi Austria, the group’s branded-goods company, took over marketing and sales. Production at Inzersdorf ended with the takeover — at the end of November 2003, according to German Wikipedia, and in 2004, according to the Wien Geschichte Wiki. German Wikipedia says the City of Vienna bought the factory site and that its historic buildings were to be kept within a housing and hotel scheme.

Vivatis was founded in 1999 and, according to German Wikipedia citing the Wiener Zeitung, belongs to a private foundation connected with Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich. Its brands include Maresi, Knabber Nossi and Inzersdorfer. German Wikipedia says that since the takeover the spreads and ready meals have been made by Landhof in Linz and by GMS Gourmet in St. Pölten; the company itself says its soups are made regionally.

The brand marked its 150th anniversary in 2023, counting from 1873, with a relaunch of its pack design, monthly cashback promotions and advertising, the company says, and in 2024 it launched a campaign under the slogan “So zackig geht g’schmackig” — roughly, “that’s how quickly tasty happens.” The Wien Geschichte Wiki illustrates its entry with an Inzersdorfer advertising poster from 1961.

For a design guide, Inzersdorfer shows how a 19th-century military cannery became an everyday Austrian convenience brand that has carried on without its original factory since the takeover. Compare Darbo, the Tyrolean jam maker, and Manner, Vienna’s wafer house. For this guide we use paprika red, tin grey and goulash brown with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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