Year 1919. On the streets of Bikaner, a twelve-year-old boy learns to make bhujia from his aunt and starts selling it for just two paisa. Completely unaware of the fact that one day this bhujia would become the foundation of a business empire worth thousands of crores and one day his name Haldiram would be printed on millions of bhujia packets sold all over the world.
This is the story of India's biggest snacking brand, Haldiram's. Haldiram was born in 1908 in a poor family in Bikaner. His grandfather used to sell bhujia in his small shop in the bhujia market and since childhood, Haldiram had a lot of interest in bhujia, that is why at the age of just 12, he worked hard for hours every day and mastered the bhujia making process and very soon started sitting in his grandfather's shop regularly but like his grandfather, he was not satisfied with just earning some extra money from bhujia.
He wanted to expand his business. The bhujia that Haldiram was selling was made from gram flour but he noticed that the people of Rajasthan liked moth dal very much. People there used moth dal in many dishes.
That's why Haldiram also started making his bhujia by mixing moth dal with gram flour. People found his new bhujia quite delicious and became an instant hit but he did not stop here. He realized that his current bhujia was quite thick and soft but if he could make it thin and crispy then the eating experience of the customers would become quite satisfying.
To achieve this, he had to first make his batter thin and also needed a mesh whose holes were smaller than a standard mesh for it to produce a thin bhujia. He collaborated with many mesh makers in the market to make a perfect mesh and also tried many iterations of his batter. Finally, after several months of experimentation, he made a perfectly thin and crispy bhujia.
This new bhujia increased sales exponentially but Haldiram's innovation was not limited to the recipe of bhujia only. Turns out that Haldiram was secretly a branding genius too. There were many other shops in the market which sold bhujia but Haldiram wanted that the importance of his bhujia in the minds of customers should be many times than that of a normal bhujia.
Haldiram knew that Maharaja Dungar Singh was the most popular king of Bikaner and people respected him a lot, that is why Haldiram named his bhujia after Maharaja Dungar Singh, Dungar Sev. Labelled with the Maharaja's name, his bhujia stood out from all the other normal bhujias and also got a premium positioning. With this new branding, he also increased the prices and customers happily accepted that price.
In the next few years, Haldiram, along with his two brothers, had established the business well. And now at the age of 36, he also had a wife and three sons. Rising from extreme poverty everything was going very well for Haldiram, when in 1944 a big twist came in his life.
Relations between the women of the house started deteriorating. The situation got so bad that Haldiram finally had to leave home and part ways. But the problem was that along with the house, Haldiram was also taken out of the business.
The business which Haldiram had built with all his heart, today the same business didn't even pay him a penny and overnight he was on the road with his family. But due to his responsibilities he had no time to be emotional. Haldiram quickly pulled himself together and started looking for work.
One day while looking for work in the market, someone called his name. When Haldiram looked back, one of his childhood friends was standing behind him. This friend of his had returned to Bikaner after many years and Haldiram told him everything about his situation.
Years ago, Haldiram had helped his friend by giving him 200 rupees and fortunately he had not forgotten this favor. He returned 100 rupees to Haldiram the same day and these 100 rupees proved to be a lifeline for Haldiram. First of all, he took a small house on rent for his family and then started thinking of business ideas.
His wife, Champa Devi used to make delicious moong dal and moong dal was a staple dish for the people of Bikaner too. Then what? He decided to do business of moong dal.
With the remaining money, he bought moong dal, spices and other items and also set up a makeshift kitchen. Both would wake up early in the morning and prepare moong dal and then Haldiram roamed around the market the whole day and started selling this dish to local workers and office goers. Within a short time, he started selling his original passion that is bhujia along with Moong Dal.
Due to his hard work, taste and quality, he developed a loyal customer base and within a short time, he gathered money to rent a small shop. Within a short time of opening the shop, word spread in the market that Haldiram and his Dungar Sev were back. People started lining up in his shop and within no time Haldiram again became the local bhujia king.
In the next few years, Haldiram focused only on growing this shop, but then something happened in the 1950s which proved to be a big turning point for him. Haldiram had gone to Kolkata for the wedding of his friend's daughter. There he had prepared bhujiya for all the guests and when he saw the reaction of the guests after eating bhujiya, he was quite surprised.
Those people liked bhujia so much that they were not only praising it but were also giving bulk orders to Haldiram. Haldiram had understood that expanding his business in Kolkata was a huge opportunity especially because there was no big competition there who sold bhujia. In 1955, Haldiram sent his younger son Rameshwar Lal and his eldest grandson Shivkishan to set up business in Kolkata.
Here too he started with a small house and a shop of only 8 square feet. The beginning was slow but eventually even in Kolkata his business started growing due to word of mouth and within no time he started selling 150 to 200 kilos of bhujiya a day. Also, to attract Bengalis, according to their taste, he launched a salty snack named Bengali mixture, which became quite successful.
In the next 12 years, his shop grew from 8 square feet to 25 square feet and the business was also doubling every year. Being a big city, the business of Kolkata branch had now become bigger than that of Bikaner branch. By 1968, all three sons of Haldiram were settled, his elder son, Moolchand was handling the business of Bikaner, Sati Das had separated from the family and opened independent shops and Rameshwar Lal was running the Kolkata business.
In view of this, Haldiram took semi-retirement from the business and he used to visit only occasionally to supervise the business. Business was already going well but what happened after this was going to prove to be a golden chapter in Haldiram's business journey. Haldiram's eldest grandson, Shivkishan, who was till now working with his uncle in Kolkata business, decided to open a branch of Haldiram in Nagpur in 1968.
After coming to Nagpur, Shivkishan saw that the people there loved sweets like balushas, Gujarati peda, Mysore pak and laddus. Meaning, the people there loved sweets but till now they were not exposed much to sweets from other parts of India. Seeing this opportunity, Shivkishan started selling his favorite kaju katli along with bhujia in Nagpur.
Initially customers were hesitant in buying it, hence Shivkishan started offering free samples to his customers. Once tasted, people went crazy for the kaju katli and the demand skyrocketed. Seeing this success, Shivkishan also started offering sweets like malai laddu, rasgulla, and ras malai and knowingly or unknowingly this was the beginning of Haldiram's becoming the biggest player in the Indian sweet industry.
By 1971, two outlets of Haldiram's had opened in Nagpur but Shivkishan did not want to stay here. One day Shivkishan went to a restaurant named Kirti which opened his eyes. That restaurant offered only dosa and lassi and there was always a crowd of customers.
It was from here that Shivkishan got the idea of converting Haldiram's from a shop into a restaurant. After discerning the market, he realized that Maharashtrians prefer South Indian dishes like dosa and idli more. Now he wanted to offer Bikaner's popular snacks like samosa and kachori in his restaurant, but before that he had to bring customers to his restaurant, that is why he started with those dishes which were in demand that is dosa and idli.
Shivkishan opened a 30-seater restaurant and very soon all the seats in his restaurant started being occupied. Seeing this, they doubled their seating capacity and also added samosa and kachori to the menu. The customers who came to eat dosa and idli, Shivkishan would ask them to try samosa and kachori and as it happened with Kaju Katli, the same happened now.
Most of the the customers who tasted their samosa and kachori once, became their regular consumers. In the next few years, multiple outlets of Haldiram's were opened in Nagpur and due to this, Haldiram's in Nagpur had transformed from just a bhujia business to an Indian snacks, sweets and restaurant business. In 1975, Kolkata branch's Rameshwar Lal separated from the family business structure and became independent.
An agreement is made according to which Rameshwar Lal will not do business outside West Bengal and Moolchand and his sons will not enter West Bengal. By this time, the Nagpur branch of Haldiram's was doing very well but Shivkishan had bigger plans than this in his mind. He wanted to expand in a city which would make Haldiram's a national level brand and that city was Delhi, the capital of India.
Shivkishan chose his younger brother Manohar Lal to expand in Delhi. By then Manohar Lal was working in Bikaner business and Shivkishan was seeing a lot of potential in him. In 1982, Manohar Lal came to Delhi with his younger brother Madhusudan and saw that Chandni Chowk was full of famous snacks vendors.
He had never seen so much competition in his life. But the good thing was that along with the competition, there was also a lot of demand. Manohar Lal bought a place for his shop with the help of Shivkishan and started the business in 1983.
For the next one year, working day and night, he built his reputation in the market and started breaking even, when a big tragedy hit him. The terrible anti-Sikh riots of 1984 had scorched Delhi and during this time Manohar Lal's workshop and house too got burned down. For the next 2 months, Haldiram's business in Delhi had come to zero.
But Manohar Lal did not give up, he took financial help from Nagpur and Bikaner and acquired a new 300-square feet workshop in Delhi and restarted the business. The reputation he had built came in handy and the business started picking up again. Over the next few years, he not only expanded his current workshop but also established a new 2,000-square feet factory and also opened new outlets.
Business was continuously growing but even after all this, Haldiram's was still a medium-sized local business but Shivkishan and Manohar Lal wanted Haldiram's to become a world class consumer brand. People of every household in India should consume their products. He observed that after liberalization, brands like PepsiCo, Kellogg's and Nestle have started selling convenience foods in India.
Basically, packaged and ready to eat food. But Haldiram's spotted a huge gap here. All these foreign brands were investing thousands of crores in marketing packaged food of western culture to Indians but at that time no brand was selling Indian snacks in long shelf-life packaging.
Seeing this opportunity, Haldiram's first started selling its products like Bikaneri Bhujia and aloo bhujia in nitrogen packaging, due to which their shelf life increased from a few days to a few months. Due to this new packaging, Haldiram's business was no longer limited to Nagpur or Delhi. Now people in even the smallest cities of India could buy Haldiram's bhujiya.
After the launch, customers responded very well to these products and hence Haldiram's diversified its packaged food segment into rasgulla, sonpapdi, pickles, kachori and even bhelpuri. Within no time, Haldiram's started selling more than 400 packaged food items. To target consumers with different purchasing power, they offered their products in different pack sizes.
Like, small packs of many of their products are available for only 5 rupees and big packs go up to 200 rupees plus. Also, he knew that snacks are an impulsive purchase. Therefore, Haldiram's, using the color psychology made its packaging attractive and finally, to reach every corner of India, Haldiram's onboarded more than a hundred distributors and lakhs of retailers.
Due to these strategies, today people eat Haldiram's snacks in almost every house in India. And even in more than 80 countries like US, Singapore and UK, Haldiram's is one of the most popular Indian snacks brand. About a 100 years ago, Haldiram's started by selling bhujia for two paise and today the same Haldiram's has done a business of more than 9,000 crore.
The story of Haldiram's proves that by delighting customers, constantly innovating products, and changing with time any big business can be built, no matter how small the beginning. If you liked this video, then I would recommend that you watch this video next.
