Milestones in our history

In the 1930s, a young girl qualified for her HGV licence because her father wanted her to. The milk churns from her parents’ dairy product business had to be collected from the farms around the Odenwald and the Rhine Valley. In 1932, Martin Faber entrusted this task to his daughter Elisabeth Pfenning, née Faber. At the time, she was the only one of five daughters to enter the male-dominated world of agricultural milk transportation. In the same year, her husband, Johann Pfenning, founded the eponymous milk transport company. An unusual beginning to the story of pfenning logistics, and it has been equally noteworthy over the 90 years since, to this day.

It is the story of a family company that now has its third generation at the helm in the person of Karl-Martin Pfenning, the son of Johann and Elisabeth Pfenning. In 1975, at the tender age of 25, Karl-Martin Pfenning joined his parents’ company after graduating in business management. He “industrialised” the transport, built up a company fleet park and established nationwide transport services. He is a founder member of the co-operation LogSped, and within 15 years had become its executive director, chairman and supervisory board chairman. Five years later, in 1980, he successfully entered the new business sector of contract logistics. During this time, pfenning logistics developed an innovative warehousing concept – the first 5-star goods hotel in Germany. Pfenning was the first contract logistics company nationwide to be certified to the ISO standard in 1993.

In 1996, with his withdrawal from the LogSped association, Karl-Martin Pfenning decided to make the move to complete independence. He developed the family company into a modern contract logistics provider, securing it a leading market position as a modern retail logistics provider. In 1996 and 2005 he guided the company into the highly competitive markets of Romania and Hungary. However, he discontinued these Eastern European commitments for strategic reasons in 2011. In 2006, he was a finalist in the national “Entrepreneur of the Year” competition.

In 2009, Karl-Martin Pfenning set the course for a further big step in the company’s history: the pfenning Group logistics centre was planned well in advance, but completed at a record speed of only 12 months. It has been located on its 20-hectare site since 2012. The multicube rhein-neckar is the most modern and most sustainable industrial new-build in Europe. In 2013, after 80 years, the company moved its head office from Hessen to Baden-Württemberg, and settled to Heddesheim. That same year, the “multicube rhein-neckar” received the Gold Certificate of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) with a top mark of 1.21 out of all newly-built industrial plants in Europe. This success story was continued in 2018 with the multicube rheinhessen, which in 2020, with an overall performance rating of 83.5%, received the DGNB Platinum award, making it one of the top 10 logistics centres in Europe.

Today, pfenning logistics is the biggest owner of logistics space in the Rhein-Neckar metropolitan region. However, the logistics expert also holds a significant role all over Germany, and is among the Top 100 of the German logistics market. The family company constantly works itself into the upper ranks, and was rated 55th out of 60,000 logistics services providers in Germany in the overall ranking by the renowned “Top 100 der Logistik” study. In the field of consumer goods distribution and contract logistics, the company is ranked in 14th place. Well known as a contract logistics provider, the company group continued to develop it product portfolio between 2014 and 2018. Today, the group includes a personnel service provider that operates all over Germany and a car dealership that supplies and supports company fleets with cars and utility vehicles.

We will soon have a whole century behind the high level of logistics competence that pfenning logistics demonstrates on a daily basis – in little ways and big.