Best Practice: Excellence from nature

Ever more people are trusting in the healing powers of nature and relying on natural therapies. In Giessen, a multi-award-winning company has made a major success of this: Pascoe Naturmedizin.

German Design Award 2018, German Brand Award 2017, for eight years now one of the best employers in Germany, and for four years one of the hundred most innovative German SMEs – so what sort of a company hides behind this series of accolades? The path takes us to Giessen, the university town in FrankfurtRheinMain region. One focus of work at the university is not least the life sciences – only logically given that the institution is named after chemist and pharmacist Justus Liebig. This is the setting in which “Pascoe Naturmedizin” emerged. Friedrich H. Pascoe, who at the end of the 19^th century helped develop the field of complex homeopathic remedies, founded the firm “Pascoe & Co. chemisch-pharmazeutische Präparate” in 1918 in Giessen. Today, his grandson Jürgen Pascoe and his wife Annette manage the company, whith a focus on is strong on research and international operations.

In her office with its soft colours on the second floor of the company head office on Schiffenberger Weg, Annette Pascoe, who graduated in Business Administration, explains the secrets of the company’s success. “We prioritise a strategy in line with the St. Gallen management model, which is based on personality analyses, and in-company health management adapted to each individual person. You cannot imagine how fruitful that is,” she enthuses. Intense communication and great transparency ensure that all staff members are closely involved in the company’s approach. Personality analyses enhance mutual understanding and create a positive working climate. And promoting good health, which includes the use of the company’s own products such as high-dosage intravenous vitamin C, also helps. “Our health ratio is 50 percent higher than the sector average,” Annette Pascoe proudly reports.

One visible sign of the company’s success is its new building in Giessen’s Europaviertel (Europe district) neighbourhood: a combined production, research and lab facility designed in keeping with Feng Shui principles. It is here that in future the firm’s roughly 200 naturopathic medicines are to be produced and exported to over 30 different countries around the world – among them blockbusters such as Neurapas (herbal medicine against depressive moods), Pascoflair (herbal remedy for agitation), Basentabs (food supplements to support the acid/base balance) and Pascorbin, the only approved high-dosage intravenous vitamin-C solution in Germany. At the inauguration in May 2018, Jürgen Pascoe declared: “For some 50 years now we have been manufacturing our products at Schiffenberger Weg in Giessen and are coming up against our capacity limits. With the new production facility we are clearly championing Giessen as our home. After all, we’ve been based here for exactly 100 years now.”