We all know what the oldest profession in the world is (hint, it isn’t picking the Pantone colour of the year)…but have you ever thought about which companies are the oldest in the world?

Call us nerdy, but we have and we find it fascinating! According to Wikipedia’s list of the oldest companies in the world, most of the first businesses were in the hospitality industry: hotels, pubs, restaurants and breweries. So perhaps the oldest profession in the world was actually … bartender? Even more interesting is that the six oldest companies were all Japanese.

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The following companies are just a random sample of some of the oldest companies out there…

8 of the oldest companies in the world

1) Kongo Gumi, 578, Japan – The earliest known company is no longer in business, but it rates a mention since it lasted until 2006 – that’s 1,400 years! Kongo Gumi was an Osaka-based construction firm that specialized in building Buddhist temples. Amazingly, the company stayed in the family for 40 generations. (Talk about succession and estate planning over multiple generations. Clearly, they took dynasty trusts to the next level!) Sadly, it went into liquidation just six years ago and its assets were bought by Takamatsu Corporation. The Kongo Gumi name survives as a subsidiary of this construction group. The next four oldest companies are all Japanese hotel companies. The sixth oldest company was founded in 771 and made paper bags (for carrying your lunch along the Silk Road, presumably).

2) Stiftskeller St. Peter, 803, Austria – The oldest restaurant in Europe is also the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the world. It is located within a monastery in Salzberg. The Bingley Arms, the oldest pub in Britain (and originally named The Priests Inn), opened a hundred years later and has been giving the monks at Stiftskeller a run for their money for some 12 centuries.

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3) Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, 1221, Italy – Founded by Dominican monks in Florence, Italy, the Officina is one of the oldest pharmacies in the world and created the first “Eau de Cologne”. The monks used medicinal herbs from their gardens to create medications, balms and tonics (just like the apothecary in Romeo & Juliet!). A mere 400 years later, the pharmacy opened to the public in 1612. Today, the Officina has shops in France, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the US, Japan and Taiwan.

4) Stella Artois, 1366, Belgium – Stella is not the oldest beer in the world. It does not come from the oldest brewery (that would be the Weihenstephan Brewer in Germany founded in 768) nor even the oldest brewery in Belgium (Grimbergen, 1188). However, it has a unique history. The company was originally called Den Horen (“the horn”) and the name was changed to Artois in 1717, after the master brewer at that time, Sebastian Artois. Two centuries later, Stella Artois was created. Brewed in Belgium, Stella was first sold in Canada as a “Christmas beer” in 1926. (Because nothing says ‘Christmas’ in Canada like a brewski!) Today it is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD).

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5) Dutch East India Company, 1602, the Netherlands – Also known as Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, this shipping company needed a steady supply of cash to finance its trading routes to and from the Far East. As a result, it became the first company in the world to publicly trade its shares – creating the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the process. Sadly, the company went bankrupt by 1800. The first company to trade on the New York Stock Exchange was the Bank of New York (BK) in 1792 and it continues to trade today.

6) Fiskars 1649, Finland – The world’s #1 brand of scissors is the oldest company in Finland. While the company got started making furnaces, wrought iron, nails, wires and farm tools, it was the 1967 launch of its famous orange plastic-handled household scissors that made it famous. After making an orange juicer with orange resin, a prototype for a pair of scissors was made using the leftover resin. The orange colour stuck (who doesn’t love orange?) and today over 1 billion pairs of those scissors have been sold. Fiskars (FIS1V) has traded on the Helsinki Stock Exchange since 1915.

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