A Berlin confectioner, 1918.

Rausch dates itself to 1918, when Wilhelm Rausch opened a confectionery business in Berlin making pralines, chocolates and honey cake. German Wikipedia, citing the company, says he was the son of a master confectioner and chocolatier and ran seven confiserie shops of his own in the city. The company’s timeline reaches back further, to a pastry shop his father, also named Wilhelm, opened in 1890, and so counts the 1918 founder as its second generation. His three children carried the business on.

The company credits the founder with the Hauchfeine Täfelchen, “wafer-thin tablets” four centimetres square and 1.2 millimetres thick, developed in the 1920s — a close cousin of the Braune Blätter that Hachez introduced in Bremen in 1923. Under Gerhard Rausch, who took charge in 1952 with his siblings Ilse and Willi, the company says it added 6.7-gram miniature pralines sold as “La Petite Praliné” and the Rausch Schokoladen-Barren, a pack of individual chocolate pieces.

For the firm’s fiftieth anniversary, in 1968, Gerhard Rausch opened a new chocolate factory in Berlin-Tempelhof; the company says the city’s Governing Mayor, Klaus Schütz, attended. A factory shop there closed in 2017 to free space for production, Der Tagesspiegel reported. His son Jürgen Rausch joined in 1971 and led the business from 1981 until 2023, the company says, and in 1982 he built a second factory in Peine, in Lower Saxony between Hanover and Braunschweig. In 1998 the Peine site gained a visitor attraction, the Rausch SchokoLand, with a chocolate museum, a café and show production, German Wikipedia says.

Fassbender, the Gendarmenmarkt and fine cocoa.

In 1989 Rausch bought Fassbender, a Berlin confectioner founded in 1863 and once a supplier to the Prussian court, together with its recipes, Der Tagesspiegel reported. In 1999 the joined names opened Fassbender & Rausch on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin-Mitte. With some 1,500 square metres of selling space over three floors, it was described by Der Tagesspiegel as Europe’s largest chocolate house; Focus reported in 2018 that the house alone turned over about €10 million a year. The company says a patisserie where pralines are made by hand opened in the building in November 2025.

Rausch was early to single-origin bars in Germany. Its Plantagen-Schokolade range, in which each bar uses fine cocoa from a single growing region, dates from 1998 according to the company and from 2000 according to German Wikipedia. The company says it extended the range with 6.7-gram Minis in 2001, echoing the Barren of the 1950s, and with 40-gram sticks in 2003. The company says it has bought fine cocoa directly from farms since the late 1990s. It now calls this approach “Direct Trade,” a standard it set for itself, and says it deliberately does without Fairtrade or organic seals. It names direct partners in Grenada, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Trinidad, and says the beans are shipped to Hamburg, then roasted, ground and conched into its own chocolate masses.

In 2014, the company says, it set up its own research farm, Tres Equis – Finca de Cacao, on about 40 hectares of former pasture within sight of the Turrialba volcano in Costa Rica. It says a first small harvest was shipped to Hamburg in summer 2020, full exports began in 2021, and the farm’s cocoa goes into its Costa Rica 84 per cent bar. These are the company’s own statements; we have not seen them independently confirmed.

Germany’s chocolate makers.

The seven brands in this group all make chocolate, and they come from three countries: Läderach, Sprüngli, Camille Bloch and Villars from Switzerland, Hachez and Rausch from Germany, and Bernachon from France. Six are Swiss and German chocolate houses; the seventh is a Lyon chocolatier that makes its chocolate from the bean in its own workshop.

Swiss and German chocolate brands tend to reach the public through the bar, the box and the shop window, and their identities are often built on a family name, a home town and a long list of dates. A bean-to-bar chocolatier works the other way round: it buys cocoa beans, roasts and grinds them itself and sells the result over its own counter, so its identity rests on the maker, the recipe and the place where the chocolate is made. Some firms combine the two, running shops while selling bars far beyond them.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its beans come from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A fifth generation and a direct-sales bet.

Robert Rausch, Jürgen’s son, joined in 2011 and is counted by the company as the fifth generation. He repositioned the brand, and “Fassbender & Rausch” became simply Rausch. In October 2015 the family took the brand out of supermarkets altogether, giving up more than €15 million in sales, to sell through its own chocolate houses and online, Focus reported in April 2018, quoting Robert Rausch: “They laughed at us.” The company says these chocolates are sold only in its houses in Berlin and Peine and in its online shop. In July 2023 it opened a Rausch Schokoladenhaus in Peine with a café, a factory shop and a charging park for electric cars with 44 charging points, the regional broadcaster NDR reported.

The business has a second side. German Wikipedia, citing Die Welt, says Rausch makes chocolate for the discounter Lidl under labels including J. D. Gross; Focus reported in 2018 that these products were made in a separate plant in Peine and brought in about €100 million a year, roughly 90 per cent of the company’s turnover. The parent, Rausch Schokoladen Holding GmbH & Co. KG, is based in Berlin, and the company describes itself as a fifth-generation Berlin family business. No official colour values or typeface for the Rausch mark are published.

For a design guide, Rausch shows how a family maker can keep its own name for its own shops while a private-label trade carries the volume. Compare Hachez, the Bremen maker whose production moved to Poland under Danish ownership, and Zotter, the Austrian family chocolate maker that also built a visitor destination around its factory. For this guide we use bitter cocoa, cream and a foil gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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