An embroiderer’s second business.

Rauch began as a sideline. The company’s own history says that at the end of the nineteenth century Franz Josef Rauch and his siblings moved down from a mountain farm at Dünserberg to Rankweil, in the Rhine valley of Vorarlberg, Austria’s westernmost state, and set up an embroidery business. On 1 September 1919, it says, he bought the neighbouring building, with a cider mill and a schnapps distillery, as a second source of income — a modest start with an old hand-operated basket press and a few beer kegs in the cellar. Both German and English Wikipedia give 1919 as the founding year and Franz Rauch as the founder, and the Austrian broadcaster ORF Vorarlberg repeated the 1919 Rankweil founding in April 2024.

At first the mill pressed fruit for local farmers for a fee. The company says that from 1920 the family sold juice under its own name instead, and that in 1926 it built concrete storage tanks for 150,000 litres. At the 1927 state cider and juice exhibition in Dornbirn, it says, a Rankweil juice scored 16 out of 18 points in the commercial-mill class.

The decisive change, by the company’s account, was technical. Unfermented apple juice became popular in Vorarlberg from the mid-1920s, and in the early 1930s the Rauchs found the Böhi process in Switzerland, which keeps filtered juice under carbon-dioxide pressure in tanks instead of heating it. The company says it installed Austria’s first Böhi plant in 1933, and that clear Rauch apple juice in swing-top bottles then sold well in Vorarlberg and Tyrol. In February 1933, it says, Franz Josef’s sons Eduard and Ernst bought the juice business from their father, and the family embroidery was wound up.

Supermarkets, cartons and a slogan.

By the 1950s, the company says, about a third of its sales came from Tyrol, with trucks crossing the Arlberg pass several times a week to a depot in Innsbruck. It credits its later growth to Austria’s new self-service grocery chains: when the Drexel brothers of Dornbirn founded SPAR in Vorarlberg in November 1957, Eduard Rauch agreed to work with them within weeks, according to a recollection published on the company’s website.

In 1962, the company says, a third generation took over: Trudi, Erich, Franz and Roman Rauch, children of Eduard and Ernst, who set themselves the goal of becoming Austria’s largest juice maker. It says they widened the range in the 1960s to grape, blackcurrant, orange and blueberry juices, sold concentrates as well as juice, and that Roman Rauch built up a network of fruit suppliers behind the Iron Curtain, in countries such as Romania.

German Wikipedia says that in the 1970s the brands Happy Day and Bravo made Rauch the market leader in Austria, and that the company moved from glass bottles to Tetra Pak cartons. When an Austrian anti-smoking campaign ran with the line “Ohne Rauch geht’s auch” — “it works without smoke,” Rauch being the German word for smoke — the company answered with “Ohne Rauch geht’s nicht, wenn man vom Fruchtsaft spricht” (“without Rauch it won’t do, when it comes to fruit juice”), a slogan German Wikipedia says stayed well known into the 1980s.

German Wikipedia says iced tea joined the range in 1998. In 2000 Rauch bought the Fohrenburg brewery in Bludenz, and in 2019 sold it to Brau Union Österreich, part of Heineken, the same article says, citing the Vorarlberger Nachrichten. Since February 2008 Rauch products have been distributed by the German Bitburger brewery group, English Wikipedia says, citing ORF Vorarlberg. In June 2016 Austria’s Federal Competition Authority announced a cartel-court decision against Rauch over the coordination of retail prices with retailers between 2003 and 2012. In 2017 the German trade paper Lebensmittel Zeitung named Happy Day a “Top-Marke” among fruit drinks, the trade site about-drinks reported in July that year.

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 juice brand and a bottler.

Rauch is also a contract bottler, and its largest customer is famous. In November 2010 ORF Vorarlberg reported that Rauch filled more than 90 per cent of Red Bull’s cans, half at its plant in Nüziders, near Bludenz, and half at Widnau, in neighbouring Switzerland; a Rexam can factory and a Red Bull plant making the drink’s base mixture at nearby Ludesch had been built close to the filling line to shorten transport. English Wikipedia, citing that report, calls Rauch the world’s largest bottler of beverages for Red Bull, and German Wikipedia calls it Red Bull’s largest contract filler. In 2019, English Wikipedia says, citing the Vienna daily Kurier, the two companies announced plans for a canning plant in Arizona; Rauch’s website now lists Rauch North America at Waddell, near Glendale, Arizona. German Wikipedia also says the Rauch logo appears on the Red Bull Racing Formula One cars, in cooperation with Red Bull.

In April 2024 ORF Vorarlberg described a company with 15 plants and seven further branches and three lines of business — branded products, contract bottling and fruit processing — still based in Rankweil and one of Vorarlberg’s largest employers. The company says it has remained an Austrian family business for four generations. In June 2026 about-drinks reported that Rauch had taken over Kloster Kitchen, a German maker of organic ginger shots founded in 2015, after the insolvency of its parent company.

The brand’s pictures have a long history, by the company’s account. Around 1934, it says, a Tyrolean poster artist drew a juice-giving apple that served as the Rauch advertising motif until the 1960s. At the end of the 1940s Eduard and Ernst Rauch commissioned an artist from Schlins to paint a fruit tree on the company’s façade; that “Rauch tree”, the company says, has appeared on almost all Rauch products since 2012.

For a design guide, Rauch shows how one family name can carry both a supermarket juice brand and a bottling business for another company’s drink. Compare Red Bull, whose cans Rauch fills, and Darbo, another Austrian family fruit business. For this guide we use an orchard green, an apple red and a juice amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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