One family, five generations, two countries.

In 1904 Gotthard Sauer opened the first Bakery Thomas in Fischbach, near Frankfurt am Main. The Frankfurter Kranz and a naturally leavened sourdough were on the counter from the start, and both are still made to the family recipe.

His son Rudolf took over in 1929. Rudolf and his wife Mary had no son to inherit the trade, so their daughter Anita entered the bakers’ guild herself — unusual then, and not encouraged. She married the baker Friedel Thomas, and together they ran the bakery. In 1964 she earned her Meisterbrief — the master craftsman’s certificate of the German baking trade, and a qualification very few women in the trade held at the time.

Their daughter Ursula Wenzel, born in 1960, inherited the business in 1979 and earned her own Meisterbrief. She modernised the production without touching what mattered: the timings, the ingredients, the refusal to shorten a ferment.

In 2012 Ursula brought that method to Shenzhen. Not a franchise and not an interpretation — the same recipes, the same standards, imported ingredients where local ones would change the result. Today the fifth generation runs four shops across Nanshan, supplying our own counters and a number of the city’s hotels and restaurants.