A baker follows his future wife to the Emmental.

Kambly began in Trubschachen, a farming village in the Emmental valley of the canton of Bern. The company tells its origin as a love story: during a stay in French-speaking Switzerland, the young Oscar Kambly met a girl from Trubschachen, followed her to the village and trained there as a baker and confectioner in the village bakery. After working abroad, the company says, he came back, took over his former master’s bakery and started his own business with his new wife. Speaking to swissinfo.ch in 2010, his grandson Oscar Kambly III said the couple had met at a commercial school, and that the business grew from Bretzeli — thin, wafer-like biscuits baked to a family recipe — made first for friends and the village.

English Wikipedia gives the founder’s full name as Oscar Robert Kambly (1887–1957). German Wikipedia, citing a 2007 book on the Kambly Bretzeli, says he began making them in 1906 from his grandmother’s recipe. In 1910, with his brother Paul, he founded the company and turned the bakery into a biscuit factory; the company still counts its history from that year. It says that when raw materials ran short in wartime, the founder preferred to halt production rather than change his recipes, and that in 1924 he launched the Caramels à la crème d’Emmental, a cream caramel named after the valley.

The second generation brought industry. German Wikipedia says Oscar J. Kambly took charge in 1953 and combined what he had learned of industrial production in England with Swiss confectionery and chocolate-making; the company says he set out to join artisan pastry with modern machinery, and that it designs and builds its most important machines itself.

Bretzeli, Butterfly and a goldfish.

Kambly’s range is fine, sweet biscuits in the premium segment — about twenty varieties in 2016, German Wikipedia says, citing a company factsheet — together with some savoury baking. Besides the Bretzeli, German Wikipedia names Butterfly, Caprice, Matterhorn and Mignon among the best known; the company describes the Butterfly as “the thinnest pastry in the world,” which is its own claim.

Since 1959 Kambly has also made the Swiss army’s military biscuit, according to German and English Wikipedia, and since 2010 it has sold it to civilian customers too; the Swiss tabloid Blick reported in July 2011 on the village-shop chain Volg stocking it.

Kambly’s most travelled idea is a small fish. In 2022 MEL Magazine, quoting a Kambly representative interviewed by New Jersey’s Courier-Post, reported that Goldfischli crackers were first baked in 1958 as a birthday present from Oscar Kambly to his wife, a Pisces, and that by 1959 they were sold in seventeen countries; English Wikipedia credits Oscar J. Kambly but gives the year as 1954. In 1962 Margaret Rudkin, founder of Pepperidge Farm, who had tried them on holiday in Switzerland, introduced Goldfish to the United States; the Kambly representative said Rudkin licensed the trademark for the shape and the recipe.

The brand is also visible beyond the shelf. In 2010 swissinfo.ch described a train in Kambly livery running several times a day between Bern and Lucerne, past the factory at Trubschachen, where a visitor centre, the Kambly Experience, tells the company’s story; German Wikipedia shows a Kambly tin decorated with Albert Anker’s painting of “Erdbeeri Mareili,” a character from a story by the Emmental writer Jeremias Gotthelf.

Biscuits and ownership.

The seven brands in this group all make biscuits, and they come from four countries: Kambly from Switzerland, Delacre from Belgium, Lambertz and Griesson from Germany, Lazzaroni and Matilde Vicenzi from Italy, and De Beukelaer, whose story runs through Belgium and Germany. Biscuit makers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family bakeries that still carry a founder’s name to large groups that own several brands and plants, and a single name can move from one kind of owner to another over a century or more.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried by a tin, a wrapper and a recipe it promises has not changed, while the company behind the name may have been sold, merged or renamed more than once, and the biscuits themselves may be baked a long way from the town on the packet. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its signature products and where they are baked — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still family-owned, still in Trubschachen.

Kambly has stayed in the family. The company says Oscar A. Kambly, the third generation, took over from his father in 1983 — Oscar Kambly III told swissinfo.ch in 2010 he had taken the reins in 1981 — and built up exports. In 1999 it bought a second plant at Lyss, also in the canton of Bern, which Der Bund reported in 2012 it would leave; German Wikipedia says it closed in 2013. At the turn of 2015–16 Kambly bought the former Tekrum biscuit works in Ravensburg, Germany, from the Griesson-de Beukelaer group, German Wikipedia says, to ease access to the European Union market after the franc’s rise against the euro; the handover took effect on 1 January 2017.

In June 2020 Oscar A. Kambly handed the chief executive’s post to his son-in-law Nils Kambly, while his daughter Dania Kambly, a great-granddaughter of the founder and a board member since 2011, became chair of the board in May 2024, Schweiz am Sonntag reported. In a release dated 22 May 2026 the company announced a new top-management structure, under which Nils Kambly left and Dania Kambly took charge as the board’s delegate, German Wikipedia and Bilanz report. English Wikipedia gives 650 employees and revenue of CHF 180 million for 2023.

The company calls itself Switzerland’s largest biscuit manufacturer and leading exporter in its field, selling in more than fifty countries, which it says account for about half of sales; German Wikipedia, citing a 2016 factsheet, put the foreign share at about 40 per cent. In 2010 Oscar Kambly III told swissinfo.ch that would-be buyers were told: “Keep your dollars, I’ll keep my passion.”

For a design guide, Kambly shows how a village, a family name and one small biscuit can carry a brand for more than a century. Compare Pepperidge Farm, which made Kambly’s goldfish an American snack, and Lindt, another Swiss name in fine confectionery. For this guide we use burgundy, gold, pasture green and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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