From our network: Schoeller International celebrates its 60th anniversary

The father of AFN-founder Martin Schoeller established the company ‘Schoeller International’ in 1966 to establish plastic beer crates worldwide – including in Africa.

“We need to know our history in order to develop a plan for the future,” said Martin Schoeller to around 200 guests who had gathered in Pullach on 2 October to mark the company’s 60th anniversary. In his speech, he began by outlining the beginnings of the company’s success story:

After his father Alexander had invented the plastic beer crate in the 1950s, he founded Schoeller International in 1966 to market the innovation worldwide. By 1973, he had sold licences to more than 30 countries, including South Africa.

In the early 1980s, Schoeller explained, he and his brother Christoph took over and expanded the business: “We developed innovative bottle crates and extended the concept of reusable packaging to many other sectors.”

A vision for the future: biofuels

The brothers also drove forward international expansion – including on the African continent: the network of Schoeller companies has established a location in South Africa. Currently, Kenya is becoming increasingly important: the group operates there through Smart Container Loop, a provider of pooling solutions with sustainable transport boxes.

Alongside this, Martin Schoeller is involved as a philanthropist and private investor in countries such as Togo and Kenya. He sees great opportunities, for example, in the field of biofuels: in his view, they can make a key contribution to securing the energy supply of the future, and many African regions are ideally suited to this thanks to vast areas of land suitable for agriculture.

In a recent speech at the EurAfrican Forum in Lisbon, he pointed out that just one per cent of Africa’s land area would be enough to meet the continent’s own fuel needs. Two per cent would be enough to supply 200 million tonnes of biofuels to Europe – exactly the same amount that is currently supplied from the Middle East.