Chillmi - Wir sind so frei

Exhibit: one can of Chillmi, “mint & chili”, 0.33 l, deposit-free, unopened and still full – vintage 2007, which makes it roughly twenty years old. Unlike the company behind it, the can has kept its contents. A recent acquisition.

Every bubble needs a drink. Tulip mania had genever, the dot-com era had Red Bull. And in 2007, somewhere between the last good year of the Neuer Markt hangover and the first bad week of the subprime crisis, a small company in the Swiss canton of Zug offered the German investor something new: a soft drink that would make him relax. He should have taken it more literally.

The product was Chillmi, the “Freeing Drink”: chili, mint, fruit and herb extracts, no alcohol, no added sugar, sold in a fashionably slim can from Ball Packaging. Where energy drinks promised adrenaline, Chillmi promised the opposite – to free drinkers from the worries of the day. The company’s slogan, printed on our exhibit, was “Wir sind so frei” – “we take the liberty”.

The origin story was a small masterpiece of the genre. According to the launch press release of June 2007, descendants of the Maya on the Yucatán peninsula mixed mint, chili and water from the village well after a hard day’s work; a Swiss missionary carried the recipe home and pressed it into his Bible; a grandson found it, lost it again, and in 2005 a bartender rediscovered it in a dusty drawer. Ancient wisdom, Swiss provenance, a nightclub finish – it is hard to think of a better prospectus, which, as it turned out, was rather the point.

The marketing was loud. Chillmi poured at a VIP after-show party of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Munich in November 2007, where the company also felt obliged to deny that its effect resembled that of a joint. It turned up in Second Life and sent cans to the SPD’s Franz Müntefering and Kurt Beck to cool their tempers. What it did not quite do was sell the drink: the same release admitted Chillmi was not yet available in shops.

What was available were the shares. Swiss CHILLmi AG, entered in the Zug commercial register in November 2006 with 200 million shares of CHF 0.01 each, was included in the Frankfurt open market (Freiverkehr) in September 2007 – a listing that requires little more than paperwork. In the investor forums, readers soon reported phone calls offering the stock at a “discount” to the quoted price, sometimes with two cans in the post as a free sample. The Frankfurt quote, it seems, was less a market than a price tag.

The Wiesbadener Kurier later reported that the drink never got beyond a small promotional batch, that local advertising agencies were owed around €100,000, and that one entrepreneur alone had handed over almost €900,000 for shares, mostly in cash. Prosecutors in Wiesbaden investigated those responsible for the group’s German sales company on suspicion of investment fraud and breach of trust; a lawyer for investors filed a criminal complaint. The museum has found no report of a conviction, and so states none.

The end came with Swiss efficiency. On 26 June 2008, days before the general meeting, shareholders learned that bankruptcy had been requested. The bankruptcy court opened proceedings that very day and closed them on 10 September 2008 for lack of assets; in January 2009 the company was deleted from the register. Lifespan of the listing: about ten months. Recovery for shareholders: nil. A Mainz start-up later revived the idea as “just chillmi” in 2012, but that is another can.

Museum note: Chillmi promised to free you from the worries of the day, and in a sense it delivered – few things are as liberating as a share price of zero. Our exhibit is the rarest kind of relic from a stock promotion: proof that the product actually existed. Even rarer, it is still sealed – some twenty years of mint and chili maturing quietly under aluminium, which makes it the only asset of Swiss CHILLmi AG that never lost its substance. The investors’ money evaporated within ten months; the drink is still in there. The museum strongly advises against tasting it, and against any comparison with a fine wine. The slogan, alas, has aged perfectly. They were so free.

Further reading

• Moneyhouse – Swiss CHILLmi AG in Liquidation (commercial register record) (2009)
• wallstreet-online – Investor forum thread “Swiss Chillmi Aktien” (2007–2008)
• Investor forum – Die Abzocke mit CH-Aktien im Frankfurter Freiverkehr (quoting the Wiesbadener Kurier) (2009)
• openPR – Swiss Chillmi AG: Kanzlei Thieler stellt Strafanzeige gegen Verantwortliche (2008)
• FoodIngredientsFirst – New in the Sleek Can: Chillmi (2007)
• Press release – Chillmi: ein jahrhundertealtes Maya-Rezept lässt deutsche Clubs und Bars chillen (2007)
• about-drinks – Interview: “just chillmi”, the 2012 revival (2012)