Charles L. Fleischmann
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Charles Louis Fleischmann (1835 – 1897) was an innovative manufacturer of yeast and other consumer food products during the 19th Century. In the late 1860s, he and his brother Maximilian created America’s first commercially produced yeast, which revolutionized baking in a way that made today’s mass production and consumption of bread possible.
A native of Budapest, Hungary, Charles Fleischmann was educated in Vienna and Prague. He then managed a distillery in Vienna where he produced spirits and yeast. In 1865, Fleischmann came to the United States, and was disappointed in the quality of locally baked bread in the Cincinnati, Ohio region. The brothers, along with another business partner named James Gaff, founded what became the Fleischmann Yeast Company in Riverside, Ohio, in 1868.
In 1876, they exhibited a Model Vienna Bakery at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which brought international publicity and sales exposure to the fledgling company, and yeast sales dramatically increased. Eventually, Fleischmann would own fourteen manufacturing facilities. The company still exists today as a St. Louis-based producer of yeast and other products. The Fleischmann Yeast Company eventually became the world's leading yeast producer and the second largest in the production of vinegar.
He is also responsible for numerous mechanical patents involving yeast production machinery. He helped to organize the Market National Bank and became its president from 1887 until his death in 1897. His son, Julius Fleischmann, was a mayor of Cincinnati.
Charles Fleischmann was inducted into the American Society of Baking’s Baking Hall of Fame on March 3, 2008, at the Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois.
