After bottle post takeover: Hundreds of employees apparently threatened with dismissal

Since the end of 2020, Flaschenpost has been part of the Oetker Group. Now it is merging the beverage delivery service with its own Durstexpress offering. For this, the group apparently wants to close logistics centers and lay off hundreds of employees.

Dr. Oetker's purchase of flaschenpost was one of the really big startup deals of the past year. On Wednesday, the corporation announced that its homegrown beverage service, Durstexpress, and Flaschenpost "will in future appear uniformly under the flaschenpost brand."

The company paraphrases what this means for Durstexpress: "In addition, the overall logistics will also be based on the business and operations processes of flaschenpost in the future." This means that individual logistics centres are likely to be merged. Now, however, the Rheinische Post

However, the dismissed can reapply at Flaschenpost, the company speaks of "employment offers in a neighboring warehouse", which will be made to the affected employees if possible. Thus there should be only a small staff reduction. At last count, more than 6,000 employees worked at Flaschenpost, and 3,500 at Durstexpress. In the future, Flaschenpost is to have 29 warehouses in 25 cities.

Flaschenpost was founded in 2014 by Dieter Büchl, but demand quickly became so great that the start-up had to shut down operations for the time being. Büchl took a year off, overhauled the processes and re-launched in 2016. The company grew quickly, and in 2020 Oetker acquired the beverage delivery company for up to one billion euros, according to various estimates. With its own beverage delivery service Durstexpress, the group never really managed to catch up with Flaschenpost.