2 Pfennig - Berlin Manoli Kantine

Manoli was one of Berlin's major cigarette manufacturers in the early twentieth century, operating a factory canteen — Kantine — that issued its own brass tokens for use by workers making purchases on-site. These pieces circulated entirely within a closed economy: redeemable only at the canteen counter, worthless the moment an employee stepped outside. Factory token coinage of this kind was widespread in German industrial settings before the First World War, a practical response to the inconvenience of handling small Reich coinage in high-volume lunch-hour transactions.