Last fortnight, Balaji was about to sell 10% of its company for 4,000 Cr, converting a 50 year generational business into one that finally took outside capital

Cinema Canteens

The Virani family lived in a drought-struck village in Jamnagar, where even a cycle was a luxury.

In the early 1970s, the Virani family (like most in their village) survived on farming. Two years of failed rains turned survival into despair. Crops shrivelled, fields cracked, and hunger became routine. Children ran excitedly when a gola seller visited in summer, pooling together five paise for a single ice ball.

When the land could no longer feed them, their father, Popatbhai Virani, made a brutal decision. He sold the farm and handed his teenage sons a few hundred rupees. His words were heavy but straightforward: “There is nothing left for you here. Go and earn your future outside.”

The family was poor, broke and three kids needed to work to survive. 

Three boys, Chandubhai, Bhikhubhai, and Kanubhai, left their home with nothing but those rupees and the weight of that promise. Their first attempt at business, selling farm equipment, collapsed when a trader cheated them. Dreams ended before they began.

To survive, they took jobs at Rajkot’s Astron Cinema, earning ₹90 a month as canteen boys. They swept floors, stuck film posters, and checked tickets at the gate. At night, they patched broken seats for a free plate of chorafali

But inside the canteen, a spark appeared. Patrons didn’t just come for the films; they arrived early for the potato wafers. The crunch had become Rajkot’s obsession. Yet, suppliers were often late, inconsistent, and delivered poor quality. For most, this was a nuisance. For the Virani brothers, it was a moment of clarity: 

They realised that if no one could supply wafers right, they would fry them themselves. 

In 1982, they scraped together savings and set up a tin-roof shed outside Rajkot. Sacks of potatoes on one side, a hand-run fryer on the other. Nights were spent peeling, frying, sealing, failing, and trying again. Slowly, consistency arrived. The wafer you ate on Monday tasted exactly like the one you ate on Friday. That reliability, so rare in Indian snack,s became their edge.The quality of their wafers spread like wildfire, as few could make consistently high-quality wafers.

The trio would brand their wafers “Balaji”, named after an avatar of god Vishnu.  

By 1989, they installed Rajkot’s first wafer line. Machines were second-hand, modified with jugaad, repaired by their own hands. The output wasn’t perfect, but it was steady.

Rajkot gave them more than customers, it gave them culture. Gujarat ran on farsan. Snacks weren’t occasional treats. They were daily habits, eaten with chai, at weddings, or while watching cricket on Doordarshan. Balaji didn’t need to create demand. It simply entered a ritual that already existed.

The 1990s were still fragile. 

Potatoes came from APMC mandis. Women hand-sealed packets for ₹15 a day. Distribution barely crossed Rajkot kiranas. But every rupee earned was reinvested in fryers and sealing machines. All profits were reinvested back into enabling an even more low cost business, creating a flywheel that has been observed in many companies that eventually scaled. 

By 1992, Balaji Wafers Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated. By 2000, Rajkot had its first industrial wafer line, producing tonnes of potatoes an hour, with packets rolling out identically day after day.

The boys who once walked out of a drought-hit village with nothing now had a name Rajkot couldn’t ignore: Balaji.

The empire had not yet left Gujarat. But the essentials were locked in: production control, cultural alignment, and consistency that turned a cinema snack into a household staple.

Gujarat’s Fortress

By the early 2000s, Balaji had crossed the line from a city business to a state phenomenon.

Walk into a kirana in Jamnagar or Bhavnagar in 2005. You’d see the same scene: stacks of yellow-and-red Masala Masti packs near the counter, kids clutching coins and pointing, shopkeepers calculating how many cartons would empty before Sunday. Nobody asked whether to stock Balaji. 

The only question was how many.

Market surveys confirmed what kiranas already knew: Balaji commanded a share of over 65% in Gujarat’s wafer market. For an FMCG company with no TV ads, no Bollywood stars, and no glossy campaigns, that number was unthinkable.

The moat rested on two levers - so simple they looked ordinary, until you understood how deeply they cut. The first lever was the coin.

A ₹5 pack wasn’t just a price point. It was trust. Children spent their pocket money on it daily. Families bought the ₹10 pack on train rides or for cricket evenings. A wafer habit, priced at a coin, became Gujarat’s cheapest ritual.

The second lever was distribution, built on the back of the coin.

Balaji stitched a network of 400–500 dealers, each handling 500–1,000 outlets. Margins were tuned with surgical precision; dealers received 4–5%, and kirana owners received ~20%. That last number mattered. When a shopkeeper earns more from wafers than from biscuits, your packets live permanently on the counter. Visibility became its advertising.

The discipline was almost ruthless. While rivals extended credit, Balaji adhered to a cash-and-carry policy. Dealers paid upfront, retailers restocked frequently, and working capital stayed tight. Profits circled back into fryers and sealing machines.

Competitors struggled to crack the fortress.

PepsiCo threw crores into Lay’s campaigns with film stars but at ₹20 a pack, it felt like a luxury in small-town Gujarat. ITC launched Bingo with blitz ads and quirky shapes but kirana shelves told the real story: Bingo gathered dust while Balaji cartons vanished.

Because in Gujarat, the rules may seem to be built on billboards, but in reality, they were written on counters. And Balaji owned the counter.

By 2010, Balaji wasn’t just a snack brand. It was Gujarat’s fortress built on two coins, protected by kiranas, and cemented into cultural rituals. Rivals could outspend them, but they couldn’t break the trust that Balaji had built over the years. 

They now wanted the whole thing.

Giant Bags of Money

By the early 2010s, Balaji had outgrown its roots in Rajkot. 

New factories hummed with high-throughput lines, Gujarat was the headquarters, and Maharashtra and Rajasthan were starting to take notice. Success, however, brought new attention, this time from the world’s largest snacking company.

In 2013, PepsiCo knocked on the Viranis’ door. 

The offer on the table was to acquire Balaji outright and fold it into Lay’s and Kurkure. For many entrepreneurs, that kind of cheque would have been irresistible. Selling out meant instant security, global reach, and the validation of a multinational logo.

But the timing wasn’t accidental. 

By 2012, Balaji had already captured nearly 20% of India’s wafer market, second only to Lay’s, which hovered above 40%. Uncle Chips, Bingo, and Parle trailed behind. For a family that had started in a Rajkot cinema canteen, this was an extraordinary scale.

The chart made Pepsi’s fear obvious. In just a decade, a regional family business had become the number two wafer player in India, built not on celebrity ads or big-city blitz but on coins and kirana counters. For Pepsi, buying Balaji was about more than expansion. 

It wanted to neutralise a rival before it got bigger.

But inside Rajkot, the mood was different. The Viranis had built their business without venture capital, without debt, and without outside interference. Every machine had been bought with recycled profits, and every dealer relationship had been earned over cups of tea in dusty towns. Handing it all over felt like erasing their identity.

The decision was deeply personal. 

Chandubhai, the eldest brother, had always believed Balaji was a family legacy, not a tradable asset. For three decades, they had remained rooted in Rajkot, even when advised to relocate to Mumbai or Delhi. The refusal wasn’t arrogance. It was loyalty to culture, employees, and millions of children whose daily coins built the brand.

Strategically, it made sense. Gujarat’s fortress gave cash flows that multinationals couldn’t disrupt. With a 65%+ share and growing profits, Balaji didn’t need outside money to expand. Independence preserved its operational discipline: cash-and-carry dealers, lean plants, and a ruthless focus on ₹5 and ₹10 packs.

The refusal came at a cost. 

Turning down PepsiCo meant Balaji would rise or fall entirely on its own terms. There would be no global advertising machine, no international distribution, no buffer of a parent company. Every rupee of growth would need to be earned.

But that gamble hardened the company. By 2015, Balaji had not only retained Gujarat but had begun building real traction in Maharashtra and Rajasthan. It had doubled down on plant automation, expanded SKU ranges, and kept modern trade at arm’s length, preferring the predictability of kiranas.

It was not an easy refusal. The cheque was genuine, the temptation massive. But the brothers believed Balaji’s identity was worth more than Pepsi’s money. The Pepsi offer could have been Balaji’s exit. Instead, it became its defiance.

That choice defined its identity for the decade to come: a family-run company willing to trade easy exits for the right to write its own story.

Thick Skin

By 2015, Balaji had firmly made headway outside home ground. 

In Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, new kiranas were discovering what Gujarat already knew - two coins could buy quality wafers.

In Pune’s college canteens, students pooled ₹10 for a pack that fed the whole bench. At Indore’s bus stands, travellers grabbed Balaji because it simply gave more wafers for the same coin. Value was visible in every gram, not just gimmicks. 

However, with the addition of new states came new challenges.

Modern trade tried to pull Balaji into its aisles. Big Bazaar, Reliance Fresh, and D-Mart wanted family packs and wafer canisters. Balaji complied - neatly stacked rows in air-conditioned shelves, but the truth was obvious. Supermarkets gave presence. Kiranas gave velocity. 

In Ahmedabad, a Reliance Mart shelf might look full. Across the street, Kirana’s Balaji cartons would be gone by Friday.

By 2017, competitors tried harder, too. Lays offered 12 grams for ₹10. Balaji gave 25–30. ITC’s Bingo poured crores into blitz campaigns. Shopkeepers stayed unmoved. For kiranas, advertising didn’t matter. Turnover did. Turnover belonged to Balaji.

Then came the blow.

In 2018, PepsiCo suit on Balaji came through, claiming its ridged wafer “Rumbles” infringed on Lay’s “Ruffles.” Perhaps it was motivated, as 5 years ago, Balaji turned down PepsiCo. Pepsi infact initiated the suit the same year it tried to acquire Balaji. The Bombay High Court ordered an immediate halt. Trucks were loaded, distributors were waiting, and shelves were counting on it. 

Overnight, one of Balaji’s fastest-growing SKUs vanished. For a brand built on dependability, this was the ultimate test.

Midnight calls flooded Rajkot. The brothers’ answer was steady, push salted, push masala, keep shelves full. Dealers complied. Kiranas stayed stocked. Customers barely noticed. What could have been a crack in trust turned into another display of resilience.

Policy hit margins, too. 

GST’s 12% slab squeezed snacks across India. Many rivals faltered. Balaji survived the squeeze with the same weapons it had always used: tight supply chains, cash-and-carry discipline, frugal plants. Efficiency covered what regulation took away.

By 2020, Balaji had expanded into new states, faced modern trade, fought a multinational in court, and continued to move forward.

What doesn’t kill a wafer makes the crunch stronger, as the company’s economics would show.

₹10 Coin Empire 

Balaji’s dominance rested on a simple proposition

The ₹5 or ₹10 pack that worked as reliably for customers as it did for the company’s economics. A ₹10 pack carried ~25 grams of wafers. That implied a retail price of approximately ₹400 per kilogram, significantly higher than the raw material cost of potatoes. Yet, the margin did not come solely from pricing power. 

It came from how that ₹10 was split across the chain.

This structure showed how a wafer that sold for a coin could still sustain FMCG-level profitability. Every rupee had a clear owner, and the system left room for the company itself.

The throughput math underscored the scale. A single plant at 15 tonnes/hour implied ~15,000 kg processed. At ₹400/kg realisation, that was nearly ₹60 lakh of output every hour. Over three shifts, one site could achieve a daily gross throughput of ₹ 15 crore, small coins multiplied into industrial-scale numbers.

At the workforce level too, productivity improved steadily. 

By 2021, Balaji’s revenue per employee had reached ₹55 lakh, closing in on listed FMCG peers like Britannia (~₹70–80 lakh). For a company still regarded as a regional player, this was evidence that its economics matched those of the country’s biggest names.

The genius was not extravagance but discipline. Direct sourcing, lean plants, fair but tightly held margins. A coin dropped at a kirana counter could ripple all the way up to crores on Rajkot’s balance sheet.

Balaji proved that India’s FMCG fortunes could be built not only on premium brands, but on coins whose economics were tuned so finely that they yielded national-level margins.

It was the opposite of how the other prominent brands were built, which were competing heavily with Balaji now.

Giant Killer 

By the early 2020s, Balaji was no longer the lone carton stacked in a dusty godown. 

The shelves looked different now. PepsiCo’s Lay’s arrived in glossy, corporate-approved packaging. ITC’s Bingo blared color from every angle. Haldiram’s dealers carried mountains of namkeen that could feed small armies. And yet, when the shutters rolled up each morning, the first cartons that disappeared were Balaji’s yellow packs.

PepsiCo India had muscle. In FY22, it posted around ₹8,100 crore in revenue across snacks and beverages. Lay’s and Kurkure poured money into slick campaigns, celebrities, and product development. However, Gujarat remained unmoved. In that state alone, Balaji commanded more than 70 per cent of the wafer market, while Lay’s hovered in the teens. The ₹10 masala wafer, humble and familiar, outsold the glamour by sheer force of habit and price.

Haldiram’s was a behemoth with ~₹13,000 crore in packaged snacks in FY22. But its empire was built on bhujia, sev, and namkeen. Wafers were incidental, contributing little to its leadership. Bikaji too, at ₹1,610 crore, leaned hard on ethnic snacks. More than 70 per cent of its sales came from traditional products, with Western-style wafers accounting for barely 8 per cent of its mix. Even with net margins of ~8 per cent, it was playing a different game altogether.

Prataap Snacks, the company behind Yellow Diamond, reported a turnover of ₹1,156 crore in FY22. Their strength was extruded rings and puffs, but wafer share was minor and margins razor thin. DFM Foods, maker of Crax, hovered around ₹500 crore, with patchy profitability on its extruded sticks.

The contrast could not be more apparent. 

PepsiCo and ITC opted for an asset-light distribution strategy and an asset-heavy advertising approach. Haldiram’s and Bikaji spread themselves across a thicket of SKUs, overwhelming counters with variety. Prataap and DFM fought in the low-margin extruded space.

Balaji was a specialist. One format, executed with focus. Wafers, nothing else. Heavy plants, no celebrity ads, and crucially, double-digit margins.

Then there was the counter, which was the real battleground for these companies. 

Retailers loved Balaji because it sold the fastest. A packet of Lay’s might sit for a few days until the right customer walked in. Balaji’s ₹10 pack moved within hours. For a kirana shop with working capital tied up in inventory, that mattered more than glossy ads or celebrity endorsements. A dealer would happily stock Balaji first because it guaranteed daily cash flow. PepsiCo could buy mindshare, Haldiram’s could buy breadth, but Balaji bought velocity.

Geography only sharpened this edge. PepsiCo thrived in metros, their ads on every screen. Haldiram’s and Bikaji dominated the North with their namkeen arsenals. But Balaji entrenched itself in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan, where the kirana counter was the only billboard that mattered. In Gujarat, Balaji’s wafer share was close to Coke’s dominance in cola. It was not just presence, it was monopoly. 

In India’s value-snack economy, winning the counter meant winning the war.

Big Numbers

For most of its life, Balaji was measured in coins. A ₹5 packet here, a ₹10 packet there, small change sliding across counters, habits built one coin at a time. Shopkeepers would joke that Balaji ran on chillar, yet the chillar never stopped moving. By the 2020s, those coins no longer looked small. They had compounded into thousands of crores.

In FY23, Balaji crossed a symbolic line. 

More than ₹5,000 crore in revenue with profits north of ₹400 crore. A year later, the numbers swelled even further: ₹5,454 crore in sales and ₹579 crore in profit, net margins above 10 percent. These were no longer the numbers of a “regional” brand. They were FMCG-level profits, the kind that listed peers like Prataap Snacks barely managed as revenue. 

Balaji’s bottom line was where others’ top line stopped.

The math behind it was staggering. Plants in Rajkot, Indore, and Valsad did not look like snack factories; they looked like industrial engines. A single line could process 15 tonnes of potatoes an hour, churning out 1,800 packets every minute, day after day. 

Geography itself became strategy. 

In a wafer business where each kilometre shaved points off already wafer-thin margins, Balaji’s plants sat close to Western and central markets, cutting transport costs and ensuring kirana counters were never empty. Retailers noticed. Shelves that carried Balaji rarely saw stockouts, while multinational rivals sometimes disappeared between dealer cycles.

Even regulation, which usually punishes scale, began to work in Balaji’s favour. When the 12 per cent GST slab was introduced, many small players faltered, unable to absorb the tax hit. Balaji’s lean supply chains and scale efficiencies took the punch without flinching. 

When the Supreme Court’s Front-of-Pack Nutrition Labelling deadline loomed in 2024, Balaji’s simplicity turned into a shield. With just potatoes, oil, and seasoning, its labels were compliant almost by default, while extruded rivals with long ingredient lists scrambled to rework formulations and packaging.

The result was a company that had quietly outgrown the “regional” tag without changing its character. 

Still no celebrity ads, still no glossy national campaigns, but the numbers spoke louder than endorsements ever could. By 2024, Balaji was no longer just Gujarat’s pride. 

It was one of the few Indian snack brands that could hold its own against PepsiCo without blinking.

Backbone Brand

By 2025, Balaji was no longer a “regional wafers company.” It was a backbone in India’s value-snacking economy.

The numbers prove it. Four factories across Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. A dealer network of 1,300 reaching 4.5 lakh kirana stores. Annual revenue above ₹5,400 crore with margins over 10%. A valuation being whispered between ₹29,000 and ₹41,000 crore.

The model is brutally simple. Wafers as the core product. Coins as the sacred price point. Kiranas as the distribution fortress. And throughput-heavy plants as the scale engine. Where Pepsi and ITC spent on celebrities and campaigns, Balaji turned coins into crores by controlling the counter.

It is not just a snack brand anymore. It is an operating system for affordable indulgence - predictable, high-frequency, and trusted. In western India, it is already an infrastructure. The question now is whether that backbone can stretch across the country.

Because if it does, Balaji won’t just be Gujarat’s pride. It will be India’s third FMCG giant built not on premiumisation or blitzscale, but on the most democratic unit of Indian consumption. 

A coin.

By September 2025, that question became more than theoretical. News leaked that ITC, PepsiCo, Temasek, and TPG were circling Rajkot. The Virani family was considering a minority dilution. The numbers floated were staggering: US$3.5–5.0 billion (₹29,000–41,000 crore) for a company that had never gone public and still answered to a family table.

The interest was justified. 

In FY24, Balaji posted ₹5,454 crore in revenue and ₹579 crore in profit, up from ₹5,010 crore and ₹411 crore the previous year. Its distribution reached ~1,300 dealers and 4–4.5 lakh kirana outlets. Gujarat remained a fortress, but Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh were now meaningful markets.

For decades, Balaji was treated as a Gujarati habit. In 2025, it was being valued like a national FMCG contender. The company that began in a cinema canteen was now courted in boardrooms by global giants.

Piece of The Chips

The future for Balaji will be written not in history but in the choices it makes now. 

It stands at a point where Gujarat is no longer enough, Maharashtra and Rajasthan are no longer experiments, and Madhya Pradesh is no longer a side market. The question is whether a company built on coins and kirana counters can stretch that formula across an India that is changing.

One path is familiar - the fortress model. 

Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan have deepened into impregnable strongholds, while kiranas continue to guard the brand, and wafers remain daily rituals, priced at a coin. That alone can sustain growth into double-digit margins and keep Balaji as one of India’s most profitable snack companies. However, the risk is that it remains admired yet regional, defined by dominance in the West rather than its presence across the country.

The bigger opportunity is national. 

Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Delhi are markets waiting to be cracked, but they demand more than trucks of wafers. They demand a translation of Gujarat’s habits into new cultural contexts, and a willingness to play on larger, noisier stages where Haldiram’s namkeen and Lay’s glamour already rule. Quick commerce enters here as both promise and trap. 

It lacks the deep structural advantages of kiranas: counters that never switch brands, shopkeepers who push higher-margin packets, and the daily cash cycle that rewards velocity. 

On an app, no kirana uncle is nudging you toward Balaji. There are only digital shelves where rivals can pay for placement. But within that weakness lies an advantage, flash works. A 11 pm wafer craving is no longer a lost sale, which can be delivered in minutes. 

Balaji’s low price point makes it an impulse buy to add to almost any basket. In this way, quick commerce doesn’t replace the kirana counter but extends it, opening up urban consumers who may never have walked into the small shops that built Balaji’s empire.

Exports offer another horizon. 

Indian-style masala wafers are still largely absent from most global snack aisles, and the diaspora is craving authenticity. Balaji could emerge as India’s Pringles, not polished and premium, but earthy and real. Yet this, too, requires sophistication in supply chains, branding, and governance that the company has historically resisted.

The challenges are real. 

Rising incomes are tilting consumers toward premiumized packs, a segment where PepsiCo and ITC are already well-established. Modern trade and e-commerce will demand formats beyond ₹5 and ₹10, which risks diluting Balaji’s core identity. Regulation on nutrition, packaging waste, and food safety will only tighten, demanding investment in compliance that cannot be solved with jugaad. 

Perhaps the hardest of all: professionalising without losing the family’s cultural control, the very discipline that built the empire. The next test is whether coins alone are enough to defend a future where counters are both physical and digital, habits are shifting, and rivals have deep pockets. 

The crunch of tomorrow will depend on whether Balaji can adapt without losing the edge that made it extraordinary.