Dieter Schwarz

Founding of the Lidl Discount Corporation (1973)

In 1973, Dieter Schwarz opened his first discount store in Ludwigshafen am Rhein on Mundenheimer Straße. Unable to freely adopt the name "Lidl" for legal reasons and wishing to avoid the unintended wordplay "Schwarzmarkt" (black market), he secured the rights by purchasing the naming rights from retired vocational school teacher and artist Ludwig Lidl for 1,000 Deutsche Mark. Following Lidl’s expansion across Germany, the company began entering markets in other parts of Europe starting in 1988.

By 2022, Lidl operated approximately 12,000 stores across Europe and the United States, making it the world’s largest discount retail chain by number of locations.

Founding of the Kaufland Supermarket Chain (1984)

In 1968, Dieter Schwarz and his father opened their first supermarket under the name Handelshof in Backnang, a town in the Swabian region. In 1984, the first store under the new name Kaufland was launched in Neckarsulm, with all existing Handelshof locations subsequently rebranded. After German reunification in 1989/90, Kaufland expanded aggressively into the eastern federal states, initially retaining the Handelshof name in some locations (e.g., Freiberg/Sa, Leipziger Straße). The first Kaufland supermarket in East Germany opened in Meißen in 1990. Today, Kaufland dominates the supermarket sector in eastern Germany. The company’s international expansion began in 1998 with a store in Kladno, Czech Republic, followed by further outlets across Central and Eastern Europe.

As of 2020, Kaufland operates over 1,470 supermarkets in Europe.

In 1963, Schwarz married Franziska Weipert. They live in Heilbronn and have two daughters, Regine and Monika. He was strongly influenced by his membership in the Protestant free church community. Schwarz is known to be very protective of his privacy, to an extent that no media recordings of Schwarz exist, and he refuses any kind of interview. Meanwhile, very few unique photos of him are known to exist in the press or in the image search of Google.