Ankerkraut is widely regarded as one of the clearest success stories to come out of Die Höhle der Löwen, Germany's Shark Tank — a spice-mix company that turned a Season 3 deal with one of the show's most prominent investors into a genuine multi-million-euro business.
The company and the pitch
Ankerkraut was founded in 2013, built around handcrafted spice mixtures aimed at home cooks looking for restaurant-quality flavor combinations without needing professional culinary training. The company pitched on Die Höhle der Löwen's third season in 2016, securing a deal with Frank Thelen — a prominent German tech entrepreneur and one of the show's best-known panelists, whose backing carries real credibility weight in the German startup ecosystem beyond just the capital itself.
From spice mixes to a full lifestyle food brand
With Thelen's investment and involvement, Ankerkraut expanded well beyond its original core spice-mix product line. The company grew its catalog to include teas, herbal blends, and advent calendars, selling through both its own online store and physical retail distribution — a diversification strategy that turned a single-category spice brand into a broader seasonal and lifestyle food company capable of generating revenue across multiple points in the calendar year, not just everyday cooking occasions.
The numbers today
Ankerkraut now generates approximately €12 million in annual revenue — a genuinely substantial outcome for a company that started as a spice-mixing operation, and one of the clearer proof points that Die Höhle der Löwen can produce outcomes on a similar scale to the biggest US, UK, and other international Shark Tank success stories we've documented.
Why Frank Thelen's involvement likely mattered
Thelen's own background is worth understanding for why his specific backing may have contributed meaningfully to Ankerkraut's trajectory beyond the capital itself. He built his reputation as a technology entrepreneur and investor, with a public profile in Germany that extends well past his role on Die Höhle der Löwen — meaning a Thelen-backed company on the show carries an implicit credibility signal to German consumers and retail buyers that a less prominent investor's backing might not provide to the same degree. For a consumer food brand specifically, that kind of visible, well-known backing can meaningfully accelerate the retail relationships and consumer trust a company needs to scale past its original online-only customer base.
Why food and spice brands tend to travel well on this format
Ankerkraut's success fits a broader pattern that shows up across nearly every international version of this format: food and beverage pitches are simultaneously among the most common categories to appear on the show and, when they do break through, among the most durable outcomes — because unlike a tech product requiring ongoing platform risk or a hardware product requiring complex manufacturing scale-up, a well-executed food brand can grow steadily through straightforward retail expansion and repeat-purchase customer loyalty. Levi Roots's Reggae Reggae Sauce in the UK and Snitch's fashion-adjacent consumer model in India both reflect variations on the same underlying dynamic: a genuinely good consumer product, paired with real retail distribution, tends to compound reliably once it clears its initial hurdle.
What Ankerkraut's outcome means against the show's own statistics
Ankerkraut's success is worth weighing against the show's actual documented track record, rather than assuming it's simply typical of what a Die Höhle der Löwen deal produces. Research covering the show's first eleven seasons found that just over half of pitched businesses secured a deal at all, and that funded startups carried roughly double Germany's general corporate bankruptcy rate within their first year. Ankerkraut clearing nearly a decade past its 2016 deal, and reaching €12 million in annual revenue, places it well outside the show's more common outcome — which makes it a genuinely notable exception worth studying, not a representative example of what happens to the average Die Höhle der Löwen company.
A quick primer on Die Höhle der Löwen
Die Höhle der Löwen — "The Lion's Den" — has aired on the German network VOX since 2014, built on the same core Shark Tank/Dragons' Den format used internationally, with a panel of German investors referred to as "Löwen" rather than sharks or dragons. Alongside Frank Thelen, the show's panel has included figures like Dagmar Wöhrl, a former German politician turned investor. The show has become a genuine fixture of German business television, producing both major successes like Ankerkraut and well-documented failures — we cover one, sleeperoo, in our companion piece.
The bottom line
Ankerkraut's path from a 2013 spice-mixing startup to a roughly €12 million-a-year food and lifestyle brand is one of Die Höhle der Löwen's clearest success stories — built on a genuinely good product, a credible and well-known investor in Frank Thelen, and a deliberate expansion beyond its original single-category focus into a broader seasonal product range. It's a useful counterweight to sleeperoo's insolvency in the same show's history: proof that when the format works as intended, it can turn a homemade product into a genuinely large, durable German food brand.
