Dhe cold wave is running, the customers are asking for cough syrup. Very often, pharmacists pass the green packs of Prospan over the counter – but the sick rarely know that they are relying on healing powers from Hesse. Niederdorfelden, just outside Frankfurt, is the headquarters of Engelhard Arzneimittel GmbH & Co KG, which has been around for 150 years. The company is a hidden champion in the truest sense of the word, the name and origin are not necessarily familiar, but almost everyone knows two of its products: Isla-Moos pastilles and the cough medicine Prospan. Both are not only German pharmacy classics, Engelhard supplies one hundred countries. Responsible for this are the brothers Richard and Oliver Engelhard, who run the family business with a good 450 employees in the fifth generation.
The first name in the company’s history was the pharmacist Karl Philipp Engelhard. He was a student of the chemist Justus von Liebig and worked in his father’s pharmacy at the time, the Rosen-Apotheke located at Am Salzhaus 3. Initially, his own company had the same address, the “Factory of Pharmaceutical Preparations Karl Engelhard” founded on October 31, 1872. The main product of the small manufactory: lozenges against coughs and hoarseness with extracts from Iceland moss, the recipe of which the founder had developed in 1860.