The History of Rakoll®
In 1865, the company was established to produce leather and hide glues by tanner Heinrich Wilhelm Ratjen. This was the beginning of what was to be a chequered company history. Heinrich Peschken, a Bremen chemist, acquired the company in 1911 and made his nephew Walter Peschken a partner in 1932. Ernst Stewner, the brother-in-law of Walter Peschken (who had left in 1934), became a partner in 1945 and played a major part in the company's further development. The spectacular rise of Heinr. Ratjen, Leim- und Gelatinefabriken began after the war. As its German name suggests, the company had focused until that time on producing animal glues and industrial and edible gelatine. It now turned to developing water-based synthetic resin adhesives, or "white glues". Some years later, a polymerization line was built to produce the synthetic resin emulsions needed for these adhesives on site.
The 1960’s brought further growth. New adhesives using other raw materials were added, including film adhesives and hot melts. The company expanded, entered foreign markets, establishing subsidiaries in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and licensing its products.
The RAKOLL® brand
Exactly four years later, the company was taken over by Schering AG, Berlin. In 1971, Schering merged with Isar-Chemie, Munich, to create ISAR-RAKOLL® CHEMIE. Over the years that followed, their Nienburg site was systematically expanded to become the main production location of the ISAR-RAKOLL® CHEMIE group. The company then changed hands once more in 1982 when H.B. Fuller Company, St. Paul (Minnesota), acquired the entire ISAR-RAKOLL® CHEMIE group.
Since then, the H.B. Fuller Nienburg location is the European production facility focussed on manufacturing the majority of the Rakoll® water-based and hot melt adhesives. And in the late 1990's we opened the European Technology Centre for woodworking adhesives. This unqiue centre has been providing a valuable service to our customers for more than a decade.
The Technology Centre is equipped with industrial machinery for edgebanding, softforming, direct postforming and wrapping, membrane pressing and a processing centre. This enables us to performance test our adhesives on our customers’ materials without any interruption to their production process. And, if a customer is considering changing materials, the first step in the suitability can be evaluated at our Technical Centre before a new purchase decision is made.
Our Technology Centre houses modern conferencing and training capabilities for use by, employees and customers. It is both an adhesive academy for customers, industry partners and business associates such as distributors and an in-house training facility for H.B. Fuller employees to learn more about our customers, products and industries.
The Technology Centre offers customers the following areas of performance evaluation:
- Edgebanding
- Profile wrapping
- Surface lamination
- Postforming
- 3D-Technology
- Various climate tests
- Customer specific tests
