At J.J. Darboven, we love coffee beans. Even though we unload, roast, grind and process several hundred thousand coffee beans each day in order to produce delicious coffee – one coffee bean has made a particularly strong impression over the years: Darbohne. Our faithful mascot with her rounded bean belly and permanently cheerful smile was one of the first comic figures in Germany to have been used by a company for advertising purposes. As early as the 1920’s and 1930’s, lovingly designed comics told the adventures of Darbohne in rhyming verse – for instance, about how she had travelled to Germany in a coffee bag from a coffee plantation in distant South America before joining J.J. Darboven in 1927.
This was the very first story that featured Darbone and because it did so much to help carry our company, we have redeveloped it into a film: of course this film contains frames from the original comic and, as it should be, rhyming verse - read by Albert Darboven himself by the way. But seeing as we are no longer writing from the perspective of 1927, the film tells the story, almost 100 years later, of the birth of Darbohne and of her evolution: Darbohne has not just changed visually over the years. She has also grown more mature overall and is involved with social and sustainability projects alongside J.J. Darboven. Take a look inside and discover what Darbohne experiences nowadays.

When a new series of Darbohne comics was released in 2006, she told the readers much more about the origins and the production of coffee. She travelled around the cultivation countries in South America and Africa and went on all kinds of coffee-related adventures together with her friends at J.J. Darboven. In addition to her journeys, she succeeded in entertaining young and old readers with exciting riddles, educational games and experiments. You can find and browse through the comics from 2006 here: