Manner

Home of Vienna’s Most Famous Wafer Since 1890

1. Identity & Presence

Manner is one of Austria’s most recognisable confectionery companies. Founded in 1890, Josef Manner & Comp AG is today a publicly listed company and, at the same time, a rare example of an Austrian business that has remained largely in family ownership since its beginnings. Its world extends from wafers, dragees, and sugar foam confectionary to a wider brand family that includes Manner, Casali, Napoli, Ildefonso, and the Mozartkugel manufacturer Victor Schmidt.

The company’s presence is both local and international. Its headquarters and main production site are located at Wilhelminenstraße 6 in Vienna’s 17th district Hernals, where the Original Neapolitaner Schnitte is produced until this day. A second production site operates in Wolkersdorf in Lower Austria, while a strong network of international partners makes Manner products available in more than 50 countries worldwide.

In Vienna itself, Manner remains highly visible through its dedicated shops, including the much-visited Manner Shop am Stephansplatz, as well as through everyday retail and the company’s online shop. This combination is part of Manner’s particular character: industrial in scale, international in reach, and still strongly tied to the city image from which it first emerged.

The company can be reached via www.manner.com. Its Austrian online shop can be found at shop.manner.com.

Manner on Instagram

Historic black-and-white Manner illustration showing the Stephansdom in Vienna with “Chocolade Manner Wien” lettering.

2. The Origin Story & Key Figures

In 1889, Josef Manner I opened a small shop for chocolate and fig coffee near Vienna’s Stephansplatz. His ambition was simple and unusually democratic: better quality at fair prices. When the chocolate supplied to him did not meet his expectations, he decided to produce it himself. In 1890, at the age of only 25, he acquired the concession and equipment of a small chocolate maker and became the owner of the Chocoladenfabrik Josef Manner.

That same year, the Stephansdom was registered as the company’s protective trademark, anchoring the young business visually in the heart of Vienna. Manner soon moved to Hernals, where the company expanded rapidly. By 1897, Josef Manner was already employing around 100 people; in 1913, after the expansion of the factory and the acquisition of modern machinery, Manner became a public limited company. By then, it had grown into one of the leading confectionery producers of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The decisive product appeared in 1898: the Neapolitaner Schnitte No. 239, known in everyday Austrian language simply as the Mannerschnitte. Its name referred to the hazelnuts from the Naples region, while its format and basic recipe have remained largely unchanged to this day. What began as Josef Manner’s insistence on better chocolate thus developed into one of Austria’s most familiar confectionery houses.

Two Manner production workers handling fresh wafer sheets during the manufacturing process.

3. The Core of the Craft

Despite the wide product range, the core of Manner remains, unmistakably, the Original Neapolitaner Schnitte: five layers of delicate wafer, four layers of hazelnut cocoa cream, a compact format designed to be held and shared, and a recipe whose continuity is part of the product’s character. Manner’s craft is not the craft of the single handmade object. It is the craft of consistency: making a familiar taste, texture, and experience return reliably, packet after packet.

Quality begins with ingredients, recipes, and control. Manner emphasises original Austrian recipes, strict quality standards, and responsible value creation. The cocoa used for Manner products comes from fair trade, and the company roasts its valuable cocoa beans in Vienna. For the Mannerschnitte, this matters not only technically, but sensorially: the product is expected to be crisp, nutty, tender, creamy, and unmistakably itself.

The craft also lies in the way production has been adapted to place and scale. In Hernals, where space is shaped by the realities of an urban factory, the making of the Mannerschnitte follows a vertical logic through the building: from baking to filling, cooling, cutting, packaging, and dispatch. The company also operates what it describes as the world’s largest wafer oven, a detail that captures the special nature of Manner’s production. What appears effortless in the pink packet is the result of finely organised industrial precision. In Manner’s case, tradition is not only preserved by memory, but by the ability to repeat a beloved product exactly enough for people to recognise it every time.

Manner Original Neapolitaner wafer packets moving along a production line.

4. Enduring Legacy & Resilience

Manner’s resilience lies in the rare combination of everyday availability and strong emotional memory. The Mannerschnitte is not reserved for special occasions. It belongs in handbags, office drawers, school memories, train stations, ski days, supermarket shelves, and small acts of giving. It is ordinary in the best sense of the word: a product so familiar that it becomes part of how people remember places, journeys, breaks, and childhood.

That familiarity has also made Manner a Viennese symbol. The Stephansdom on the package still points back to the company’s origins near Stephansplatz, while the Manner Shop am Stephansplatz turns the brand into a physical part of the city’s centre. According to Manner, up to 4,000 Mannerschnitten are sold there daily. Worldwide, two pocket packs are eaten every second, a figure that shows how far this small Viennese wafer has travelled without losing its local identity.

Manner’s legacy also lives through the wider confectionery world gathered under its roof. Casali, Napoli, Ildefonso, and Victor Schmidt each carry their own product memories, from Schoko-Bananen and Dragee Keksi to Mozartkugeln and praline traditions. Together, they broaden Manner’s place in Austrian confectionery culture: not only as the maker of one famous wafer, but as a house of sweets that has accompanied everyday rituals, gifts, celebrations, and small cravings across generations.

5. Vision for the Future

The future of Manner is shaped by the practical realities behind a beloved product. Raw material prices, cocoa sourcing, sugar reduction, packaging regulation, export markets, and the cost of producing an affordable confectionery product in Austria all influence the conditions under which the much-beloved Mannerschnitte can remain what people expect it to be. To reduce its dependence on the volatile global hazelnut market, the company has planted its own hazelnut trees in Azerbaijan. After all, hazelnuts are the heart and soul of the Mannerschnitte.

What makes these challenges demanding is that they must be met without weakening the values and quality standards on which the brand depends. This responsibility has a historical dimension. Carl Manner, the last major representative of the founding family in the company’s leadership, died without direct heirs in 2017 and had already helped secure the company’s long-term continuity through a foundation structure. His understanding of responsibility included the fair treatment of resources and employees, a legacy the company now connects with its commitment to Fairtrade cocoa and practical measures such as using waste heat from the Hernals production site for district heating in the surrounding neighbourhood.

Under contemporary management, Manner must hold these pressures and promises together. The task is to remain recognisable without becoming nostalgic, efficient without becoming interchangeable, and modern without losing the emotional clarity of the pink packet. In the end, Manner’s future depends on protecting both the substance and the spell of the brand.