Bonn To Win

Founded way back in 1985 by the visionary Manjit Singh, Ludhiana-based Bonn Group of Industries today produces a variety of bakery products including breads, biscuits, cakes and cookies that are not only sold in India but in the international markets as well. Steena Joy explores how this small scale company became a pioneer in starting production of cookies on an industrial scale in India and how it is adapting to the health conscious millennial generation

- Steena Joy

In 1985 at Ludhiana, a small bakery entered the food market with a single traditional oven, consuming just five bags of flour per day. Soon it received recognition amongst the local distributors for its superior quality of breads and established a significant name in the local ‘mandis’ of Ludhiana and Punjab’s grass-root level. Later, the company made a shift from the traditional oven to a rotary rack, and within two more years, the number of rotary racks had increased to three, consuming 80-90 bags of flour per day.

Reminiscing about those days, Manjit Singh, founder and CMD, Bonn Group of Industries says, “In 1985 when we started the bakery business, we had no master plan. The bread industry was small scale and there were just one or two players in Punjab. As we were already into bakery, we thought of growing in the same business. We set up a small factory with handmade machines and embarked on a 2000 breads per day plan supplying through local autos and cycles. Then we reached 10,000 breads every year and we added on and grew.”

From bread to biscuits

In 1987, the company installed one electric oven, the first in Punjab! In 1990 it purchased the plot in Ludhiana where the present facility stands. The semi-automatic plant became operational in 1994. From rolling out 50,000 breads per day per line, today the company produces five lakh breads and bakery per day. Every year a new line was added. But for ten years, it was only bread assembly lines. After successfully spending almost three decades in the manufacturing of breads, in the year 2004,

Bonn Biscuits was launched, for which a fully automated online biscuit plant was started. In 2006 the group acquired a biscuit plant in Kapurthala. As bread capacity grew, the brand moved out of Punjab to other states. Covering the entire north India, the company today has a 60- 70 per cent market share in the organised sector.