ITALY'S DECAF KING DEAD AT 80

ITALY'S DECAF KING DEAD AT 80

(ANSA) - Rome, October 12 - The man who made decaffeinated coffee acceptable Italy and pioneered the marketing of bottled mineral water has died at the age of 80.

Austrian-born Tommaso Berger built a food empire after the war and made the Hag decaffeinated coffee brand, which he acquired from a German merchant in 1950, a household name by marketing it as the closest to the real thing with all the aroma and taste of coffee but without the caffein.

He also promoted drinking bottled mineral water and at one time owned the Fiuggi, Sangemini and Levissima brands.

Aside from food products, Berger owned and marketed the therapeutic cream Vegetallumina, used for muscular sprains and injuries and invented by his father, and the shoe polish Guttalin.

Born in Vienna in 1929, Berger grew up in Milan where his father ran the Italian branch of a company created by his grandfather.

Italy's 1938 racial laws forced him to flee Italy in 1943 because of his Jewish origin and he lived out the war in Switzerland.

Berger returned after the war and took over the family company after the death of his father in 1951 and turned it into an economic powerhouse thanks in part to exploiting the new era of media advertising.

In later years Berger became entangled in a family power struggle in which he claimed, in his autobiography, he was 'betrayed' by his son.

In 1992, Berger decided to sell all his brands because, he said in a radio interview, he felt that his son was ''not capable'' of managing the empire he had created.

He then put the capital from the sale into a trust fund to protect it, he explained, ''from myself, my children and my children's children''.

However, poor management of the trust and suits filed by his children forced Berger to agree to an accord in which split up his fortune, although this was not enough to restore harmony in his family, he said in 2007.