fritz-kola
The black label with two smiling faces in white silhouette has become almost a fixture in café culture across Northern Europe, and the reason is probably not just the recipe. While most cola entrepreneurs spend their energy chasing the right balance between citrus, vanilla, and cinnamon, the two founders behind fritz-kola, Mirco Wolf Wiegert and Lorenz Hampl, spent just as much energy thinking about marketing and distribution. They were as much entrepreneurs as cola enthusiasts.
No Recipe, No Problem
The company was founded in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003, growing out of an idea born over frozen pizza and Coca-Cola in a student flat in the city. Wiegert and Hampl wanted to challenge Coca-Cola and Pepsi with a cola of their own: less sweet, and with a higher caffeine content. There was just one problem — neither of them knew how to make cola. Their first step was to search the internet for a recipe. When that failed, they spent weeks calling breweries across Germany until one agreed to help them develop a formula.
Wiegert and Hampl went about it methodically. Even the cola’s own name was settled through a market survey: with around 40 suggestions on the table, including Alster Kola, Elbe Kola and Northern Kola, they let a public vote outside a shopping center in Hamburg decide, rather than choosing their own favorite.
Selling on a Shoestring
The budget was tight from the start. Launched with an initial investment of just €7,000, Wiegert and Hampl personally delivered the first 170 crates around Hamburg, offering bar owners a full refund if the cola failed to sell. They could not afford a professional designer either, and the now-familiar black-and-white portraits on the label started out as a budget solution. The same tight budget was also why they avoided supermarkets in the early years — they could not afford the shelf space.
From the beginning, the two founders targeted cafés, bars and restaurants. For years, Fritz-Kola ranked ahead of Pepsi in Germany’s 330 ml returnable glass bottle segment for the hospitality trade, and Wiegert has repeatedly described the company’s long-term ambition as becoming Europe’s leading cola in that segment. Hampl left the company in 2016 to pursue other projects, while Wiegert has continued to lead the business.
Twenty Years On
By 2023, 20 years after the company’s founding, fritz-kola GmbH had 300 employees and had, in the meantime, expanded its range to include Sugarfree, Super Zero, Mischmasch, and a range of lemonades and spritzers. The original Fritz-Kola, made with real kola nut, contains 9.9 g of sugar and 25 mg of caffeine per 100 ml — about three times the caffeine level of Coca-Cola.
Since its launch, the company has promoted returnable glass bottles as part of its environmental profile and invested heavily in reusable bottle systems. After more than two decades of selling exclusively in glass, Fritz-Kola began testing 330 ml aluminum cans in late 2025 before expanding them across Germany in 2026, a move the company described as a response to declining return rates for glass bottles.
In Kenneth’s collection
- fritz-kola, 330 glass bottle (exp. April 2016), purchased in Germany
- fritz-kola bio, 330 glass bottle (exp. May 2020)
