| Abstract: | During the First and Second World Wars, Germany could no longer import colonial goods, such as coffee, pepper and other tropical spices. Although these commodities were not essential for the daily caloric requirement of the German people, their absence was felt considerably. Chemists began to search for a lot of appropriate substitutes, which in the end meant an enormous impact on the industry of artificial flavours. When pepper, the most important hot tasting condiment, became rare, Hermann Staudinger, the later Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, and Paul Immerwahr were anxious to find a process that would allow the large‐scale production of a synthetic pepper‐substitute by a method easier and cheaper than the one based on synthetic piperine. Staudinger's pepper‐substitute was produced by the Chemische Fabrik Dr. Höhn & Co. in Neuss on the Rhine during the First World War and by the Hoechst plant of I.G. Farben and C.F. Boehringer Mannheim during the Second World War. |
