How it started
1854–1938
In 1854, Moritz Bunzl registered haberdashery Emanuel Biach's Eidam in Pozsony – then part of the Habsburg monarchy, now part of Slovakia. In 1883, his 3 sons, Max Bunzl, Ludwig Bunzl and Julius Bunzl, changed the name of the company to Bunzl & Biach AG, and moved the headquarters to Vienna, Austria.
From 1888 they began manufacturing paper in Ortmann, and then at Wattens paper mill. From 1925 Hungarian inventor Boris Aivaz, who had patented the process of making cigarette filters from crepe paper, with some variants including cellulose wadding, experimented at the Ortmann plant. Aivaz produced the first cigarette filter from 1927 in co-operation with Bunzl's Filtronic subsidiary, but up take was low due to a lack of machinery to produce cigarettes with the filtered tip.
From 1935, a British company began producing a machine to make cigarettes that incorporated the filter tip, and so the Bunzl family developed their British interests. Following the Anschluss in 1938, with many Jewish assets and companies seized by the Nazi regime, the Bunzl family emigrated from Austria. While some moved to the United States and Switzerland, the majority settled in England to develop their small British operation.
1940–1957
The company now known as Bunzl was established in the UK in 1940 by Austrian immigrants Martin Bunzl, Hugo Bunzl and George Bunzl under the name Tissue Papers Limited, which adopted a similar line of business, manufacturing filters along with tissue and crêpe paper. The firm did not begin to grow substantially until after World War II, when the family reclaimed its assets in Austria. Although the two companies were not merged at this time, Tissue Papers Ltd. became the international distributor of Bunzl & Biach's paper and pulp products and as a result changed its name to Bunzl Pulp & Paper Ltd. in 1952.
From Wikipedia’s article on Bunzl plc, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2