Nestle Pantnagar plant set to regain glory

Nestle India's Pantnagar plant produces 7,000 tonnes of Maggi noodles a month when at full capacity

Puneet Talwar, line manager at Nestle India's Pantnagar plant, is recovering from shock. The pain of seeing the production lines coming to a halt at the country's largest Maggi manufacturing plant was too much to bear, he says. "It was like you were no more allowed to meet your own children," Talwar says.

There is hope, however, for him and others who lived through the "nightmare" of recall and ban. Two of the seven production lines have restarted since getting the green light on November 23. Supported by 987 employees, the plant is producing 90 tonnes of Maggi noodles a day now - a little over a third of the 250 tonnes prior to the ban.

But the workers here are not complacent yet. They are waiting for all seven lines to start humming. Gagan Tiwari, a Maggi point owner in Ranibagh, a tiny hamlet in Uttarakhand, is waiting, too. He is waiting to buy Maggi after the state-wide ban went two days ago. "We are serving other noodle brands and anda-bread (egg fried with bread). But, sales have gone down drastically," he says. He used to earn Rs 2,200 a day from selling Maggi prepared with vegetables and eggs. Others like him are having to sell lesser popular brands, too.

While the June 5 ban on Maggi meant loss of business as well as customer trust for Nestle, officers at Pantnagar had another challenge: To keep the officers' morale going. Ravi Singh, in charge of human resources, organised technical and behavioural programmes, sports activities and yoga to keep them motivated during the months the noodle was being grilled on test labs.

Majority of the contractual workers, some 850, deployed during the pre-ban times, however, were let off.

The plant began operating in 2006 with two production lines and, over the years, became the major producer of Maggi Masala noodle in India, with seven lines in place by 2009.

"I was confident that no excess lead can be present in our products," Harsimran Singh, who is in charge of quality assurance in Pantnagar, says. When questions related to presence of excess lead were hurled, Singh kept assuring the management and friends that reviews show no mistakes on their part.

Nestle decided to stop production in Pantnagar on June 4, a day ahead of the food regulator-issued ban on production, sale, distribution and export. "It took a couple of hours to digest the instructions, when I was informed (by the management) that we have to immediately shut down all the noodle manufacturing units," S L Girdhar, Pantnagar factory manager, recollects. Girdhar was travelling towards another city when the instructions came. The news came as a blow to other officers and workers, too.

Of course, the picture is different now as two fully-automated lines roll, round the clock, to produce India's top-selling instant noodle. Talwar and his colleagues know the process by heart: Thin sheets of flour are "stilled", giving them the desired shape, steaming, drying, frying, cooling and, eventually, packing them with the tastemakers. These are the men of the moment for Nestle. After recovering from the biggest crisis in the history of Nestle in India, they have a dream to materialise.