A drought, a failed first business and a theatre full of snackers.

Balaji is the brand name of Balaji Wafers, a potato-wafer and snack maker based in Rajkot, Gujarat, and still owned by the family that started it. Its story is usually told through Chandubhai Virani, who runs the company, and his brothers Bhikhubhai and Kanubhai. Forbes India reported in 2021 that the three brothers left their village in Jamnagar district for Rajkot in 1974, after their father, Popatbhai Virani, sold the family’s farmland and divided the money among his sons. ThePrint, in a 2023 profile, said a drought had forced the move.

The brothers’ first venture, in agricultural products and farm equipment, failed within about two years, Forbes India said. They then took work at Astron Cinema in Rajkot, and were eventually given its canteen to run. The company’s own history says the Viranis did odd jobs at the cinema from 1974 and were later entrusted with the canteen; ThePrint reported that they won the canteen contract within two years.

The wafers came out of that canteen. The company says that in 1981, noticing that moviegoers were unhappy with the wafers their supplier delivered, the family began making their own and calling them Balaji Wafers; Forbes India and ThePrint both date the start of the chips to 1982, made in a small room in Rajkot. Accounts of the name differ in detail. ThePrint said it came from a Balaji temple just outside the cinema; Forbes India said it came from a small glass idol of Lord Hanuman kept in the room where the brothers started. Either way, the name stayed when the business outgrew the cinema. The company says that by 1984 the brothers were frying wafers by hand and supplying nearby shops, where customers queued for packs.

From hand-frying to automated plants across western India.

The move from kitchen to factory came at the end of the 1980s. The company says that in 1989 it used a loan to build a semi-automated factory in Rajkot; English Wikipedia places that first plant at the Aji industrial estate, and says the wafers had been produced at the Viranis’ house until then. In 1995, the company says, the business became a private limited company, opened a fully automated factory and added a range of Indian namkeen, the savoury mixes and fried snacks sold alongside chips across India. It says its fully automated Rajkot plant, opened in 2002, was the largest in the country at the time.

Expansion followed the brand’s home market outward. The company dates a plant at Valsad, in south Gujarat, to 2008 and one at Indore, in Madhya Pradesh, to 2015. ThePrint listed four factories in 2023 — Rajkot, Valsad, Lucknow and Indore — while Forbes India had reported in 2021 that a plant in Uttar Pradesh was under way. Market-research figures from Euromonitor International, as cited by Forbes India, put Balaji’s share of India’s potato and vegetable chips market at 9.5% in 2008 and 13.7% in 2012, and the business newspaper Mint reported in 2013, as cited by English Wikipedia, that it held about 90% of the market in Gujarat.

Its strongholds have stayed western. Forbes India described a core of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, built up over close to four decades before the company pushed into neighbouring regions; in 2023 ThePrint counted 14 states, plus exports to the United Arab Emirates, Australia and the United States. The company now groups its range into wafers, namkeen, western snacks, noodles and confectionery, and its own timeline counted more than 65 products by 2019.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Indian snack and Mexican food names: Balaji, Kurkure, Sunfeast, Unibic, Tajín, Marinela and De la Rosa. Indian snack and Mexican 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 food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the snack or meal it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are 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 family firm that said no, and a pitch built on the pack.

Balaji has remained a Virani family business. In 2013 Mint reported that PepsiCo was exploring an offer for the company. ThePrint reported in 2023 that PepsiCo made an offer in 2014 and that the family refused to sell; Chandubhai Virani told the site a small minority stake would have been acceptable, but nothing more. Forbes India, describing the same 2014 approach as coming from a foreign company, quoted him as saying the company was his daughter and his son, and that he did not sell his family; it also reported that he had rejected a stock-market listing. His brothers later moved on to other ventures, ThePrint said. A younger generation is now in the business: Forbes India reported that Shyam Virani, who studied economics in the United States, joined in 2019, started in sales and marketing and became the youngest director.

The brand’s pitch has rested on the pack rather than on advertising. ThePrint summed it up as “more chips, less air”: the company kept marketing spending low and passed the savings on, offering more wafers at the same price as rivals. An analyst quoted by Forbes India in 2021 estimated that a Balaji pack held 50 to 80% more wafers than a typical one. Advertising came later; ThePrint reported in 2023 that the company had only recently begun making ads, using digital media for cheaper, more targeted campaigns, and quoted Virani: “Now we’re building an image.” The company’s campaign archive now carries lines such as “Hawa Nahi, Taste Mein Hai Dum” — roughly, the strength is in the taste, not the air — alongside a “Super Factories” film about its plants shown on National Geographic, and its website uses the line “Dil se banaya, blockbuster ban gaya.”

For a design guide, Balaji shows how a regional snack brand can make value itself the message, letting a fuller pack speak before the advertising does. Compare Haldiram’s, the Bikaner bhujia shop that became a national snack giant, and Bikaji, another family-built namkeen brand. For this guide we use wafer gold, chilli red and a deep maroon with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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