110 years of entrepreneurial spirit –
Success over four generations

A Bavarian baker’s family

Martin Freiberger, cited in the local register of 1470 as a church estate administrator, is amongst the earliest residents of Amerang to be named in the official records. One of his descendants,
Parental home and bakery in Amerang

the peasant’s son Martin Freiberger, purchased the bakery in the middle of the village on 28th August, 1895 – the first entrepreneurial initiative after centruries of traditional country life. In 1943, his orphaned grandson, Ernst, took over the business. In 1949 he married Else Rechl, who like him, had been forced by circumstances to take on at a very early age responsibility for managing the family business - the hotel and tavern ’Zur Post’.

Taking the plunge as entrepreneurs

In 1949, the dynamic business couple was quick to recognize the
Ernst Freiberger Senior
(1927 – 1997)

opportunities that the emerging “economic miracle” offered the food industry. Starting out with the most modest of production facilities in a wooden shed next to the bakery, they manufactured – initially parallel to running the bakery - EFA ice-cream, the initials of which could be read as either „Ernst and Else Freiberger/Amerang“ or „Eiskremfabrik Amerang“ („Ice-cream factory, Amerang“).

Rising to the rank of the Federal Republic’s third largest ice-cream maker

Although sales of EFA ice-cream focused mainly on Bavaria and later Berlin, the firm’s
Semi-automated production in
the early Nineteen Fifties

fleet of 350 special delivery trucks did, in fact, serve the entire market of Federal Germany. The high point of the EFA ice-cream business came in 1972 when the firm held exclusive rights to sell to the Olympic Games in Munich. In 1973, EFA-Eiskrem merged with “Südmilch-Eiskrem” in Stuttgart. And in 1977, Ernst and Else Freiberger sold their shares in the firm.

From ice-cream to health clinics

A
Health clinic “Chiemseewinkl”

willingness to take risks and passion for detail were the qualities Ernst and Else Freiberger both needed and demonstrated when they shifted the focus of their business activities from the food sector to a completely different industry altogether. In establishing rehabilitation clinics in the most beautiful regions of Bavaria’s Alpine foreland they laid the foundation for today’s Medical Park AG.