A creamer series celebrating Schwingen, Swiss wrestling.
Keystone / Gaetan Bally
If you’ve ever ordered a coffee in Switzerland, the chances are you got a little creamer on the side. Did you carefully pocket the colourful foil top, the Kaffeerahmdeckeli? Probably not. For many Swiss, however, collecting these is almost an addiction – at least it used to be.
“The collectors of coffee creamer lids were a real nuisance. In cafés there were people who went from table to table begging guests for their lids, or they scavenged deserted but not-yet-cleared tables for them. I eventually started punching a hole in the torn‑off lid after emptying the cream…”
One person’s passion is another person’s peeve, as that reader reaction to an article in the Tages-AnzeigerExternal link from 2022 shows. While many people still buy or exchange lids, the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s are certainly over. But at its peak, Switzerland was the global hub of a very curious hobby.
“Nowhere else was the collection of these small aluminium and plastic foils as excessive as in this country,” said the Tages-Anzeiger, describing how, in the 1980s, individual series were traded for several thousand francs, collectors’ clubs were formed and people would get together to swap lids. “Today, entire collections are available for free on the internet, club websites are dwindling and the hype has died down.”
How does something intrinsically worthless gain value? Why were certain motifs more popular than others? And why were the Swiss in particular so crazy about coffee creamer lids? The Tages-Anzeiger asked – but didn’t answer – some interesting questions, but that hasn’t stopped plenty of other amateur cultural anthropologists from analysing the Great Swiss Coffee Creamer Lid Boom (and bust).
“Thousands of years ago, people had to gather berries, fruit, wood etc. But today you can buy all of that around the corner at [supermarkets] Migros, Coop and so on. Yet this primal instinct to collect must still be present in some people, and so they end up collecting things like this,” wrote another reader. “Or is it simply a way to pass the time?”
‘Distinctly Swiss trait’
“The story of the coffee creamer lids represents a distinctly Swiss trait – one that perhaps no longer exists,” wrote Waltraut Bellwald in Kaffeerahmdeckelisammeln oder die Faszination des NutzlosenExternal link (Collecting coffee creamer lids, or the fascination of the useless), an essay which appeared in the magazine Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde (Swiss Folklore Archives) in 1996.
“Namely that of inventors and tinkerers, those ‘ordinary people’ who want to achieve something, who pursue an idea tenaciously even in the face of hardship and never give up,” she said. “The story of the creamer lids is therefore also the story of Walter Auf der Mauer.”
Born in 1912, Walter Auf der Mauer was the son of a mountain farmer who dreamed of having his own dairy business. After the war he took over a dairy in Zurich, which did well – but he wanted more. “I always imagined that there must be something that could really make money, a gap in the market, a product that didn’t even exist yet,” he said in Bellwald’s article. At the 1967 World Exhibition in Montreal, he was impressed by a UHT (ultra-high heating) machine that gently sterilised and homogenised coffee cream. Lots of tinkering later, Auf der Mauer built his own machine and by 1973 his company, Burra, was producing 30,000 coffee creamers per hour. Rival companies soon sprang up.
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“The coffee creamers were very popular with consumers and restaurateurs,” Bellwald noted. “The portions were ideal for consumers: especially in small households, in offices without fridges and for stocking up. In cafés and restaurants, where open cream jugs had repeatedly led to arguments and complaints due to a lack of cleanliness, the hygienic coffee creamer portions provided a solution.”
Advertising potential?
But what about the lids? In the early years, they had only one job, Bellwald said: protecting the contents and keeping them fresh. “They actually still have this task, which is why interests collide: manufacturers and distributors want a product that closes as tightly as possible and provides optimum protection for the contents, while collectors want a lid that’s easy to remove and doesn’t tear.”
Making lids at the Emmi production facility in Emmen in 2022.
Keystone / Christian Beutler
For many years, the only decoration on the lids was the manufacturer’s name and an indication of the contents. “Occasionally, a printed arrow showed coffee drinkers how to remove the coveted liquid, while a clearly marked tab was a further visual aid,” she wrote.
The fact that advertising could appear on the lids was recognised early on, but the possibilities couldn’t be fully exploited as there was a general ban on commercial advertising on creamer lids. “Only a few catering businesses, a few local anniversaries and a few exhibitions related to the dairy industry were allowed to advertise on them.”
The challenging dimensions – the lids generally have a diameter of 35-38mm – mean advertisers have never spent much of their budget on coffee creamers.
‘Pleasing, unobtrusive and popular images’
It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the lids made the transition from disposable item to collector’s item, and the changing colourful images attracted the attention and desire of coffee drinkers.
“At first it was castles, typical Swiss landscapes and natural beauty that were depicted on the round lids – postcard-style motifs in miniature that triggered a sense of recognition and created emotional connections,” Bellwald said.
“Depictions of customs, traditional costumes, motifs from the Swiss Museum of Transport and cantonal coats of arms were other pleasing, unobtrusive and popular images. Even though Kaffeerähmli today are adorned by computer drawings, Swiss architecture, body painting, comics, Swiss tanks, skyscrapers and high-tech motifs, there remains a distinct preference for the decorative and homely, the traditional and familiar from our own country.”
Educational designs would also appear from time to time. “For example, with questions on Swiss history, with Basel and Alsatian dialect expressions explained on the back of the lid, with a not entirely error-free stamp quiz or with a German-French language course in 90 lessons (with phrases such as ‘Can the dog have a drink?’ or ‘That’s an impertinence!’).”
Bellwald reported that “in the peak year of 1994”, a total of around 150 series were issued.
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Coffee creamer lid tweezers
“Of course, people think I’m mad,” Konrad Megert, who had been collecting lids for about seven years, told Swissinfo in 2001. Like many, he started simply because he thought they looked nice.
Megert, whose collection contained around 2,000 series, didn’t know how much it was worth but reckoned it could be as much as CHF40,000 ($50,000). “But I don’t do it for the money. It’s simply the pleasure of collecting and of meeting people.”
A lucrative business sprang up around Kaffeerahmdeckeli – KRD to those in the know – and forgeries are not unknown. Many new series are produced with collectors in mind and are never intended for cafés or restaurants. “If you want to buy every new series, it can be very expensive,” Megert said.
Canny entrepreneurs were quick to offer collectors a range of objects they never knew they needed: coffee creamer lid tweezers “for optimum sorting”; a chrome-plated steel hand-roller “for guaranteed smooth lids”; special “Deckeli-Clean” products for keeping the collection in good condition; albums for perfect storage…
International notoriety
By October 2014, coffee creamer lids were dwindling in popularity and media exposure, but overnight they were suddenly back in the news – and how!
“Swiss retailer apologizes for coffee creamers featuring Hitler” (Time magazine), “Swiss supermarket chain sells Hitler cream pots” (The Daily Telegraph), “Hitler cream strikes sour note for Swiss” (The Times of Israel) – headlines around the world reported how some coffee drinkers in Switzerland had been startled to find images of Hitler or Mussolini on their creamers.
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The images – part of a historical series of 30 creamer lids featuring cigar band designs – had been produced by a subsidiary of major Swiss retailer Migros. Migros apologised for the “inexcusable blunder”.
One collector, who had the lids with the two dictators, was worried that the entire collector community would suffer. “When I first saw the series, I did think that I personally wouldn’t have chosen Hitler as a subject, but in the context I don’t find it problematic. After all, it’s a collection of historical figures,” Margrit Gräub, who had been collecting the lids for 30 years, told news portal WatsonExternal link.
“This hobby is already dying out, and this incident has now further damaged our reputation. Now there’s a bitter aftertaste whenever you think of coffee creamer lids.”
Tough market
Twelve years later, the website for Club Kaffee-DoppelcrèmeExternal link, founded in 1986, gives tips on how to make a few francs from a collection, but it admits that “it’s hard to sell coffee creamer lids nowadays”.
One after-effect of the boom is that it’s definitely a buyer’s market. “Many collectors are selling their collections due to lack of space, time or health reasons,” it says. “Unfortunately, there are hardly any new collectors. Young people today have other hobbies. Supply exceeds demand enormously, which unfortunately contributes to a great decline in value. The well-known Blick series, for example, which is listed in the catalogue with a maximum value of CHF6,000, can be found today for CHF150.”
As early as 1996 Waltraut Bellwald concluded that the “feverish era” of collecting coffee creamer lids was over, “but as long as new images are offered on the little cream portions, they will find their collectors, because the fascination of the useless remains a sustaining element of how people cope with everyday life”.
Edited by Samuel Jaberg/gw
