With India’s biggest corporates in its customer list and some of the world’s most reputed brands among its partners, ingredient maker Calpro Food Essensial Pvt Ltd products have percolated down to even smaller towns. Manoj John checks out the company’s plans with its managing director Amit Agarwal.
For an entrepreneur hailing from a family which is into printing, food ingredient is a strange business proposition. But Amit Agarwal, after his education at the University of Texas at Austin, did not waver from his decision to work with the baking industry.
Today, Agarwal’s Calpro Food Essentials Pvt Ltd is the leading supplier of speciality raw materials to all forms of baking firms, from five-star hotels to small street-side bakeries. The Calpro Group, privately held by the family, consists of Calpro Food Essentials Pvt Ltd and Calpro Foods Pvt Ltd, with the latter looked after by Agarwal’s brother.
The Group represents many international brands in India. Its customers include behemoths like ITC, Hindustan Unilever, Dabur and Anmol Biscuits. Calpro’s product portfolio covers everything that a baker needs—preservatives, emulsifiers, hydrocolloids, proteins, fibers, stabilisers, and improver systems. Besides bakery, its products are crucial to confectionary, dairy, fruit products, and snack foods industries.
Calpro Food Essentials has significant presence in pre-mixes, which have gained much favour in the bakery industry. “Our pre-mixes allow chefs to experiment in a great way,” says Agarwal. “In bread premixes, you can almost say we have no competitor. When someone starts a new bakery, he wants Calpro products. Besides bread premixes, we are the market leader in fruit fillings too,” says chef Khan, who plays a key role in developing new products in the company.
“In cake mixes, we have the largest range in the country. The company probably has the largest range of ingredients for other products in the bakery industry too,” adds chef Khan.
But Agarwal is not resting on his laurels. The company is constantly innovating itself and expanding its operations. “We want to strengthen our operations significantly,” he says, charting out Calpro’s growth path since 1984 when the company started with producing calcium propionate.
“We want to start a new factory for dry products. We are also planning a 2000-square feet laboratory to develop and test new products. We are also on way to boost exports in a major way,” says Agarwal.
Calpro has a steady and continuous growth history. “We are basically a family of printers. We were based out of Bhopal. We used to manufacture wrappers for Modern Breads. Then we moved into manufacturing ingredients for bread,” Agarwal reminisces.
In 1989, it converted from manual production to a fully automatic plant in Haryana having an annual capacity of over 1800 MT. The company decided to leverage its access to major players in the food industry in 1997. That was the beginning of setting up a distribution network to supply other bakery ingredients such as wheat gluten, whey protein and bread improvers.
Calpro Food Essentials has good synergy with Calpro Foods to accentuate its reach and penetration into the market and accordingly developing solutions for the need gaps, according to the company. It is Calpro Food Essentials which is closely aligned with the bakery industry. It serves artisan and home bakers too along with major bakeries.
It serves small and large industrial, retail and artisan bakeries. Hotels, caterers, in-store bakeries, airline catering and coffee shops spruce up its customer base further.
Calpro has partnership with several globally renowned brands such as BakeMark International (BMI), Aldia, and Mevo-Holland. It has a partnership also with CSM. BMI is among the world’s largest supplier of bakery ingredients, owning more than 55 companies. It has been championing the cause of better baking ingredients and has reputed brands like Meister Marken, BIB – Ulmer Spatz, Carels, Arkaday Craigmiller, Croaxa under its portfolio.
As for Aldia, Calpro is its Indian distributor for premium range of fruit fillings and glazes. The Belgium-based Aldia produces custom products for Calpro under the latter’s BakeWell Brand. Aldia, whose history dates back to 1927, is one of the largest fruit processors in the world. Its portfolio includes jams, fruit fillings, glazes, fruit pastes’ jellies and preserves. Similarly, Mevo is a specialist supplier of high quality Dutch chocolates. The Dutch company uses patented recipes. It can custom-make chocolates depending on customers’ individual needs.
Even as the company counts India’s biggest corporates among its customers, its products have penetrated small towns too. “Our re-packed products are available in small towns. Quality bakery products are percolating down,” Agarwal says.
“The bakery industry began to witness change when multinational companies and supermarkets arrived in India. Today, people want to eat healthy food. Here again, there is a catch. People actually want to eat what they think is healthy, which may not actually be healthy. On the other hand, people are buying healthy food but they want to indulge also,” Agarwal captures consumer behaviour.
“Global chains arriving in India and supermarkets are the trendsetters. The change in consumer behaviour has been driven largely by the youngsters. The growth in the bakery industry is enormous,” Neeraj Mahajan, country head – key accounts of the company, buttresses Agarwal’s observation.
“But the big question is how to Indianise the international products. We follow the international trends very closely through our association with CSM. Calpro knows how to adapt international trends for the Indian palate,” adds Mahajan.
The company lays considerable thrust on research and development. It has a bakery training and research facility for developing new products, testing and training in New Delhi. “The key to the successful reception of our products by customers is our research and development activities. We have employed highly accomplished technologists and Chefsat our R&D facility,” says Agarwal. Calpro is managed by professionals consisting of not just food technologists and chefs but also engineers and business professionals. The company has plans to set up more labs.
Developing innovative products also brings with it its own hitches. The rules under the Food Safety and Standards Act are really tough for companies in the bakery ingredients spectrum. Each product needs elaborate testing in central laboratories and certification. As of now, there are many ambiguities in the Act. Some ingredients are not permitted under a certain name but are permitted under another name.
“There needs to be some streamlining in the implementation of the Act. The authorities must start with big companies and then scale down to smaller ones,” Agarwal puts across his views. For the time being, Calpro’s self-imposed priorities are developing new products and expanding its existing market.
