Headquarters with that
special spirit

Einbeck and KWS – that’s a special relationship, and one Christine Coenen enthuses about. “KWS is the largest employer in Einbeck and enormously important for the town,” says Coenen, who works for KWS as an interpreter and translator, serves on its Supervisory Board and is an employee representative. However, Einbeck with its half-timbered houses has also shaped the company. “A lot of employees live in the region.” They have their roots here, are socially engaged and couldn’t imagine living without KWS or far from Einbeck, adds Coenen. “Einbeck and KWS have embraced each other. This spirit is our location’s great strength.”

KWS began from scratch in Einbeck in 1945. The British military transported the Rabbethge, Büchting and Giesecke families, accompanied by 60 tons of high-quality seed, from Klein Wanzleben in Saxony-Anhalt to Lower Saxony. The first granary was built on the grounds of a former shoe heel factory. “At the time, that was the biggest private construction project in the British occupation zone,” states Coenen, one of whose duties is to give visitors tours of the campus.

The granary is still there to this day – the symbol of an unprecedented success story. Laboratories, greenhouses, workshops, office and administrative buildings, recycling depots, a modern cafeteria: Headquarters in Einbeck is a high-tech location. From a few hundred in the beginning, the workforce has increased to around 1,700 at present.

There were plenty of milestones in the past 76 years. “One was development of our own monogerm sugarbeet varieties, which were launched in the mid-1960s,” says Coenen. What was so advanced about the sugarbeets was that cultivation could be completely mechanized, eliminating the laborious process of manual thinning. Hybrid corn varieties that delivered far greater performance were also developed in the sixties. Introduction of biotechnology in the seventies and eighties was a further turning point, as was construction of the first Biotechnology Center in 1999 and Biotechnology Center 2 with its buildings for cell biology, laboratory chemistry and molecular biology research around 20 years later. “We’ve always had big leaps in growth here,” says Coenen.