Historik

From Jegrelius research to modern manufacturing

Already in the 40th century, the chemist Gunnar Jegrelius experimenting with producing eco-friendly detergents. The experiments led to the manufacturing, and in 1966 started the chemical and technical plant Glykocid in Vadstena.

What Kempartner and Jegrelius have in common is that the plant in Vadstena is now called Kempartner AB. Gunnar Jegrelius passed away in 1981, 15 years before Kempartner acquired the factory of the, at that time,  owner "Tekniska fabriken Gripen", and was unfortunately not able to visit us.

In addition to his business, Jegrelius began with his life's work, a knowledge bank of research in plant chemistry, natural products and toxicology. Efforts to successfully develop and manufacture environmentally friendly products with ingredients from the plant kingdom has lived on through Kempartner continuing operations in Jegrelius spirit. Even today, many of the traditional recipes remain in an archive storage of Kempartner. The large collection of his works are currently on Jegrelius research center in Östersund.

We can proudly say that we toasted in our wastewater from the factory in Vadstena!

It all started in 1977 in a basement in Farsta, just outside Stockholm.
 
Leif who founded the company this year developed products, bottle them and drove them on a small trailer to the carwash.

Environment and health was the beacon for Leif at that time – just as it is for the company today. But back to where it all started.  The interest towards environment started early and Leif realized that a lot of the workers at the car repair shops had different allergic problems. The workers had rags down in their pockets with a lot of strong chemicals on them. This resulted in a lot of rashes on their thighs, hands and arms. During this time, it was also a big terrifying increase of prostatic cancer. Leif realized that there was a great need of products that wasn’t to any harm of either the health of the users or the environment. 
Because of this, it was a easy decision to stop with dangerous chemicals. This was in the year of 1977 and the discussion of the environment and health wasn’t as prominent as it is today.
We were happy to prove that you could get the same great results without the dangerous chemicals as with the products that contained these chemicals. The step from working with the internal environment to working with the external environment was not far away.

We started early on to produce alternative cleaners and detergents and since then it has just kept on going. Today we are happy to say that we have hundreds of different products in laundry, dishwashing, cleaning, car care and household - all with environmental thinking as a base.

We have always been a head of our time when it comes to environment innovative products and we have proved it by receiving a lot of environmental prices like; 100 Global Eco Tech Award, The environmental price from the Swedish king, First climate neutral production in the world, The longest lasting wash detergent in the world – as you can see, we can make the list really long. It is because of all the appreciation that gives us the energy that we need to show the big companies in the market that you can be environmental friendly products that are still great! The greatest award is that the bigger players on the field has followed our lead in the work with the environment.  The question that has to be asked is – when is the next company in the market going to become a climate neutral company like we have been for the last 10 years?
 
Oh, and about our wastewater from our factory - there is nothing wrong with that. We control every liter of water before it is send to the purifier. Does that seem a little bit too fussy? To control the water by the source has always been a keystone in everything we have done. We don’t believe in letting others take care of something you can’t take care of yourself.
 
Cheers to the next generation!