Echinacin

Echinacin is a German herbal medicine based on purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). The pharmaceutical company Madaus introduced it in 1938 as a plant-based immune stimulant [4], and the name has remained on the market for close to nine decades. Echinacin has never been a company of its own. It is a product brand that has travelled with its maker through a long chain of sales: to the Italian group Rottapharm, to the Swedish group MEDA, to Mylan (later Viatris) and, most recently, to the French selfcare company Cooper Consumer Health.

The brand is active today. Its history also includes a dark chapter: according to German Wikipedia, the product was used in human experiments on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp. That episode is covered under Controversies below.

Echinacin's story begins with Madaus, a family business built around plant-based medicines. The physician Gerhard Madaus (1890–1942) founded the company in Bonn in 1919 together with his brothers Friedemund and Hans [5]. Their mother, Magdalene Madaus, a naturopath and author, encouraged the venture.

The young company did not stay in Bonn for long. After the French occupation of the Rhineland it moved to Radeburg in Saxony in 1921, and in 1929 it moved its headquarters again, to Radebeul near Dresden. In 1938 Madaus launched Echinacin, a remedy built on the active compounds of purple coneflower. No individual inventor is credited with the product; its introduction is attributed to the company. Gerhard Madaus died in 1942.

The Second World War and the division of Germany split the company apart. The site in Radebeul, in the east, was expropriated and dismantled. In the West, Friedemund and Hans Madaus re-founded the business, once again with its registered seat in Bonn. Factories followed in Karlsruhe, Wuppertal, Mölln and Aichstetten, and in 1947 the company's head office moved to Cologne, where the drug factory Dr. Madaus & Co. settled on part of a former military airfield in the district of Merheim.

The turn of the millennium nearly ended the company's independent history. In 1998 the company posted a loss in the tens of millions of euros, and by 2000 the "Echinacin maker", as the German pharmacy trade press later described it, stood on the brink of bankruptcy [5]. The immediate cause was a factory project in Goa, India, whose construction costs had spiralled out of control.

The rescue came from outside the family. Walter Droege was brought in as an external consultant in 1999 and gradually acquired 93 percent of the shares, with the family keeping the rest. A report in Manager Magazin, quoted by the trade press, described conditions at the Cologne headquarters at the time as a kind of business "Middle Ages": outdated inventory systems, excessive stock, a far too large product range and weak financial controls. By 2004 the threat of insolvency had been averted, with revenue back at 357 million euros and a return of 17 percent.

From 2007 onwards, Echinacin's ownership became a story of ever-larger pharmaceutical groups.

In June 2007 Madaus was sold to the Italian pharmaceutical group Rottapharm [4], which paid around 600 million euros for the Madaus group's pharmaceutical business [5]. Rottapharm, headquartered in Monza near Milan, had been founded in 1961 by the pharmacologist Luigi Rovati. The combined company later renamed itself Rottapharm Madaus.

In the summer of 2014 the trade press reported that Madaus was heading for the stock exchange together with its Italian parent. The listing did not happen. Instead, the Swedish pharmaceutical group MEDA bought the whole of Rottapharm Madaus for 2.3 billion euros [4]. MEDA's own independence was short-lived: on 20 July 2016 the European Union approved its takeover by Mylan, the group that later became Viatris.

The most recent change came through Viatris' decision to part with its over-the-counter medicines. In October 2023 Cooper Consumer Health made an offer for Viatris' OTC portfolio [6]. On 26 June 2024 the European Commission cleared Cooper's acquisition of Viatris' European over-the-counter business in a first-phase review, on condition that two products were divested [10]. With effect from 1 January 2025, Cooper Consumer Health Deutschland GmbH took over a large part of Viatris' OTC business in Germany [7].

Cooper itself traces its roots to 1907, when Dr. Albert Salmon set up La Coopération Pharmaceutique Française, a pharmacists' cooperative in Melun near Paris [2]. The company says its founding mission was to make effective healthcare accessible to everyone. Charterhouse acquired Cooper France in 2015, and CVC Capital Partners bought Cooper Consumer Health in 2021. According to the German trade press, the Viatris deal doubled Cooper's revenue to around 1.2 billion euros, with roughly 1,500 employees, and brought with it production sites in Mérignac (France) and Confienza (Italy) as well as a research and development centre in Monza [6].

Within Cooper, Echinacin sits alongside former Viatris brands such as CB12 and the intimate-care brand Sagella, as well as Kamillosan, Allergodil and Transpulmin. Some of its neighbours are old Madaus stablemates: Salviathymol and Agiolax, which were grouped with Echinacin among Rottapharm Madaus' herbal medicines a decade earlier, also passed to Cooper.

Echinacin is a phytopharmaceutical, meaning a medicine whose active ingredient comes from plants rather than from chemical synthesis. That sets it apart from most brands in the beauty and personal-care space: it is a licensed medicinal product, not a cosmetic, and it is presented as a remedy rather than as part of a care routine.

The brand has been tied to a single plant from the start: Wikipedia describes the original 1938 product as an immune stimulant based on the active compounds of Echinacea purpurea.

Within its owners' portfolios, Echinacin has typically formed part of a cluster of herbal medicines rather than standing alone. Under Rottapharm Madaus it was grouped with Legalon, Lektinol, Salviathymol, Agiolax and Salviagalen; together, these plant-based products accounted for about one fifth of group revenue [5]. The group's largest field at the time was orthopaedics, where products such as Dona, Go-On and Calcigen D generated almost half of sales.

No third-party certifications, awards or patents are documented for the brand.

German Wikipedia states that Echinacin was used, among other purposes, in human experiments on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where it was tested as a treatment for burn wounds caused by phosphorus bombs [4]. The account does not give a year for the experiments.

Echinacin is an active brand. The product is still on sale, and the package leaflet for Echinacin Liquidum, last revised in February 2026, names Cooper Consumer Health Deutschland GmbH as the company responsible for marketing it [8]. Nearly ninety years after its launch, the brand has outlived the independence of the family firm that created it, which ended with the sale to Rottapharm in 2007.