A nickname, an aunt’s recipe and a thinner sev.

Haldiram’s began in Bikaner, the desert city in northern Rajasthan, in 1937. That year Ganga Bhishen Agarwal set up his own small shop selling sweets and namkeen, the savoury fried snacks that India eats by the handful. English Wikipedia, citing the company, describes it as a retail sweets and namkeen shop; Forbes, in its profile of the founder’s grandson Shiv Kishan Agrawal, calls it “a tiny shop in Bikaner.” Agarwal was known by the nickname Haldiram — a name his mother gave him, The Economic Times reported in 2019 — and the nickname became the brand.

Bhujia ran in the family. Agarwal had worked at his family’s snack stall in Bikaner’s Bhujia Bazar, and he learned a softer, thicker version of the snack from his aunt, The Economic Times wrote, drawing on Pavitra Kumar’s book Bhujia Barons. Kumar credits him with reinventing it: he added flour made from moth, a local lentil, to a snack that had been made from besan, or chickpea flour, and pushed the dough through a finer mesh to make the strands thinner. English Wikipedia gives the same account of moth dal replacing besan.

He was also, by Kumar’s account, alert to the value of a name. He called his new bhujia “Dungar sev,” after Dungar Singh, a popular Maharaja of Bikaner, and with it parted ways with his grandfather’s business. The product sold: within about a decade, according to Kumar as quoted by The Economic Times, he was selling some 200 kilos of bhujia a week. Kumar describes a tall, austere man who still rode a bicycle around town in his seventies and who inspired awe in his sons and grandsons. The slender, crisp strand he settled on, sold today as Bikaneri bhujia, is still the product most people associate with the Haldiram’s name.

Kolkata, Nagpur, Delhi — and three businesses.

The first move out of Bikaner was east. Haldiram travelled to Kolkata for a wedding, The Economic Times reported, and the trip gave him the idea of opening a shop there — the first branching-out of the Bikaner bhujia business. The second generation did not take the business much further, the paper said; it was the grandsons who did. Shiv Kishan Agarwal took it to Nagpur, in Maharashtra, and Manohar Lal Agarwal to Delhi, where a shop in Chandni Chowk proved a hit. Factories followed in both cities, and then restaurants across India and abroad.

As the business grew, it divided. By 2019 The Economic Times described three distinct operations: Delhi-based Haldiram Snacks and its sister companies in the north, by then the largest; Nagpur-based Haldiram Foods International in the west and south; and a much smaller Kolkata business, Haldiram Bhujiawala, in the east. The branches fought over territory and over the trademark itself, and the Kolkata side took the dispute to court. That is why a shopper can still meet more than one Haldiram’s pack and more than one company website, haldirams.com and haldiram.com among them.

The range grew far beyond bhujia. The Indian Express put it at more than 400 products in 2025: traditional namkeen, western-style snacks, Indian sweets such as gulab jamun and soan papdi, cookies, sherbets and pickles. In 2003 the company began developing ready-to-eat foods for markets abroad, The Hindu Business Line reported at the time, and it now sells ready meals under the Minute Khana name, alongside sub-brands such as Cup Shup and Cookie Heaven and, from January 2025, Cocobay chocolates. In the year to September 2017 Haldiram’s sales of ₹4,224.8 crore overtook PepsiCo India’s snack sales, making it the country’s largest snack company again after more than two decades, The Economic Times reported. Its restaurants, many with a shop counter attached, carry the same name on the high street.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell food, and all of them come from India: MDH, Everest, Haldiram’s, Amul, Parle, Britannia and MTR. Indian food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood shop to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A merger, a professional CEO and a Singapore investor.

The Delhi and Nagpur branches have since come back together for packaged snacks. In November 2022 CNBC TV18 reported a plan to demerge the snack businesses of Delhi’s Haldiram Snacks and Nagpur’s Haldiram Foods International and merge them into one company, Haldiram Snacks Food. Delhi’s Manohar and Madhusudan Agarwal were to hold 56% of the merged business and Nagpur’s Shiv Kishan Agarwal 44%. India’s Competition Commission approved the plan in April 2023, The Economic Times reported, and the family hired its first professional chief executive in May 2023. The Kolkata business is not part of the merged company.

Outside money followed. After years of talks with private-equity firms and food companies, including Kellogg in 2019, the Singapore state investor Temasek signed a definitive agreement in March 2025 to buy a stake from the existing shareholders. The Economic Times put the stake at about 10% and the valuation at $10 billion; The Indian Express reported a stake of over 9% and said the company was also in talks to sell about 6% to the US investor Alpha Wave Global. PwC India, which advised on the deal, called it the largest private-equity consumer deal in India. The roughly ₹1,800-crore restaurant business was kept out of the transaction, The Economic Times said. Euromonitor estimated that the combined Haldiram’s businesses held close to 13% of India’s savoury-snacks market.

The snacks are made in India. The Indian Express listed the company’s factories in 2025 as Nagpur, New Delhi, Gurgaon, Hooghly district, Rudrapur and Noida, and said its products were exported to more than 80 countries, where Indian grocers abroad stock them.

For a design guide, Haldiram’s shows how a founder’s nickname and a single Bikaner snack can hold together a family brand that split into three businesses. Compare Lay’s, the crisp brand of PepsiCo, whose Indian snack sales Haldiram’s overtook in 2017, and Parle, another Indian family-founded snack maker. For this guide we use chilli red, a besan gold and a deep maroon with a Devanagari-flavoured display face, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Haldiram’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.