Fritz Hoffmann, the founder of Hoffmann-La Roche was born in Basel, Switzerland on 24 October 1868, and died on 18 April 1920. His family were wealthy business people, and provided both employment experience and investment at the beginning of his business career. He worked for a bank, a pharmacy, a chemicals merchant and a pharmaceutical trader before going into business.
In 1894 he formed a company with Max Carl Traub (1855–1919) called Hoffmann, Traub & Co, which manufactured a limited range of pharmaceutical and chemical products. His father contributed the majority of the capital, Traub some patents and contracts.
In 1895 Fritz Hoffmann married Adele La Roche. It was a common practice in Switzerland for married couples to hyphenate the name, so from this point he was often referred to as Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche.
In 1896 Traub left the company and it was renamed F. Hoffmann-La Roche & Co.
According to Peyer (below) "For his time, Fritz Hoffmann was unusually interested in product promotion" and paid attention to all aspects of publicity from simple advertising to packaging and promotion of key individuals such as pharmacists. He also built up international contacts for raw materials and product sales, and supported research. Following the setback of the First World War, these factors helped the company to recover and expand. He retired from the board of the company because of ill-health in 1919 and died the following year.