CRUNCHING NUMBERS: Balaji Wafers is valued at $4 billion

Last week, when snacks maker Balaji Wafers announced selling a 7 per cent stake to private equity firm General Atlantic — valuing the company at around $4 billion — people did a double take.

Wasn’t this the company PepsiCo sued for similarities in its chips packaging and design infringement? In fact, in 2020, the Bombay High Court had directed the Gujarat-based namkeen company to stop selling its ‘Rumbles’ chips, which allegedly looked a lot like the US cola giant’s Lay’s chips.

For Chandubhai Virani — the former canteen worker who built a snacks empire — this was just another minor speed breaker in his entrepreneurial journey, and he smartly revamped the design and forged ahead with his business.

While GA is in the final stages of clinching the deal, Balaji’s snacks had several suitors including, ironically, PepsiCo, ITC, General Mills and other PE firms.

This is the second major deal in the Indian snacks segment this year, after Temasek acquired a 10 per cent stake in Haldiram’s at a valuation of $10 billion.

The Balaji advantage

The decentralised production model and tightly-knit farm linkages of Balaji Wafers Pvt Ltd — celebrated for its founder’s rags-to-riches story — have helped trigger a ‘Gujarat snacks cluster effect’, drawing dozens of small and mid-sized processors into the ecosystem over the past two decades. “One of the better things about Balaji is its dominance in the tier 2 markets and its pretty good distribution,” says Pradyumna Nag, Founder, Prequate Advisory.

While national-level snack companies scale up through large factories and high-decibel branding, Balaji stayed close to the customer and even closer to the farm. Its plants in Rajkot, Valsad and Vadodara operate within a few hours of major consumption pockets and potato-growing belts, helping the company ensure freshness, reduce breakage and optimise transport costs. This model, replicated by multiple regional players, has reinforced Gujarat’s reputation for low-wastage, high-efficiency food processing.

“Across our plants in Rajkot, Valsad, Indore and Lucknow, we process 1,000 tonnes of potatoes a day,” Virani tells businessline. “Besides contract farming with around 100 growers, we work closely with local farmer groups at each location. Nearly 80 per cent of our raw materials — from bananas and pulses to spices and edible oil — are sourced locally,” says Virani, who started as a snack seller at a movie theatre in Rajkot four decades ago, together with his brothers Bikhabhai and Kanubhai, before going on to building a snacks empire with a topline of over ₹6,500 crore.

The decentralised approach has created a ripple effect around Balaji’s units, drawing in packaging suppliers, seasoning manufacturers, cold-storage operators and transporters. The resulting cluster has supported the expansion of regional brands such as Gopal Namkeen, Euro India, Frylo and Raj Wafers, all of which emerged in the slipstream of Gujarat’s potato-processing boom.

Balaji’s operating discipline has translated into strong financial performance. According to Tracxn Technologies, the company’s revenue climbed from ₹2,336 crore in FY20 to ₹5,553 crore in FY24, while profit after tax rose four-fold from ₹132 crore to ₹579 crore. Virani said revenue for FY25 crossed ₹6,500 crore.

Is the valuation fair?

“If you look at the topline, they are getting very much within the market estimates. It’s not an aberration,” says Prequate’s Nag, pointing out that the valuation would help if a public listing is planned in the near future. The entry of GA would also help attract foreign investors.

Virani feels his company is today worth ₹40,000 crore and that the PE firm has presented a “discounted valuation”.

The company’s market position is far higher than its low advertising visibility suggests. A November 2023 Frost & Sullivan study places Balaji among the top two players in India’s organised ethnic savouries market, with a 36 per cent share, almost level with Haldiram’s Delhi and Nagpur units combined. In the ₹25,900-crore organised Western snacks segment, Balaji sits just behind PepsiCo and ITC’s Bingo, despite its largely regional footprint.

The broader ecosystem surrounding the company has benefited from Gujarat’s agricultural evolution. The State has emerged as India’s largest producer of processed potatoes, with output rising from under one lakh tonnes in 2004–05 to 11.5 lakh tonnes today. Districts such as Banaskantha, Sabarkantha and Aravalli now form the core of the State’s chip-grade potato belt. High dry-matter varieties like Lady Rosetta, Santana and Kufri Chipsona — ideal for chips and French fries — have attracted global processors such as HyFun Foods and McCain Foods to the region, Gujarat government sources point out.

Gujarat produced 48.59 lakh tonnes of potatoes in 2024–25, with over 25 per cent earmarked for processing, creating a stable raw material base for snack manufacturers. With India’s organised savoury snacks market projected by Frost & Sullivan to clock 11.7 per cent CAGR through FY27, driven by rising packaged food adoption in semi-urban and rural markets, Balaji is positioned to gain from both category expansion and Gujarat’s maturing cluster ecosystem.

As the company prepares for its next phase — which may include a larger national play and external investment — its underlying advantage continues to rest on hyper-local manufacturing backed by a farm-first supply chain, a strategy few have been able to replicate.

More Like This

Published on November 24, 2025