Anmol Bakers in expansion mode

The market for biscuits in India is worth more than Rs 6,500 crore and it is growing rapidly at over 10-12 per cent yearly. Almost all the major biscuit-manufacturing companies are expanding to capture the Rs 2,000 crore unorganised sector market.

On Tuesday, Anmol Bakers Pvt Ltd, manufacturers of the Anmol brand of biscuits, held a meeting of its distributors and dealers in Agra in order to plan the marketing strategy of the company in the upcoming fiscal year while also inviting suggestions from the distributors on the possible ways to increase the sales of the Anmol brand, which was currently lagging at the fifth place in the country's leading biscuit manufactures, far below Britannia and Parle.

On this occasion, Gobind Ram Chowdhary, Managing Director, Anmol Bakers Pvt. Ltd said that the company had been established in 1994 and since then, it had grown to a turnover of over Rs 200 crore this year in contrast to the Rs 160 crore last year and a growth of over 10 per cent had been expected for the upcoming year in the company's business.

He said that the company produced biscuits in excess of 10,000 tonnes a month at its units in Greater Noida and Kolkata which were even being exported to South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria apart from Afghanistan, where Anmol Bakers was supplying 7500 metric tonnes of biscuits under "Daan" scheme.

He said that primarily, the company had concentrated on the North Indian market so far and was inclined to saturate this market first before targeting the other regions.

He said that in the upcoming fiscal year, the company was even planning to use the production facilities of bakers in Kanpur and Lucknow to produce around 400 tonnes of biscuits per month in order to raise its production as with the changing lifestyle of the Indian families, the demand for biscuits was growing steeply and the biscuit consumption in India, especially the Northern states, had reached gigantic scales.

He said that most of the biscuit production in the country was consumed domestically and a very small quantity of this production was actually exported.

On the other hand, he said, due to the highly localised taste of the people of the country, foreign biscuit manufacturing companies were avoiding making an entry in the Indian market which gave the Indian biscuit companies a virtual free run over the market.

According to Chowdhary, a major chunk of the Indian market had been captured by the unorganised sector which was clocking at over Rs. 2000 crore and it was this unorganised market that was presently the target of the branded biscuit manufacturers.