This is remarkable achievement and started as MSME and listed Indian stock exchanges Wonderful journey
Its biscuits accompany your morning chai, its bread delivers a quick breakfast, and its buns produce a burger of your choice – for years, Bectors Food Specialities has been part of the everyday life of many Indian households. But behind the scenes, some things are quietly changing for the makers of the popular bread brand, English Oven.
While the company has crossed INR2,000 crore in revenues this year, its profits have stagnated for the last three years and margins continue to shrink. The stock is down 60% from its peak in September 2024 and the West Asia crisis is quietly driving up logistics costs and disrupting exports.
So, how did the Indian biscuit and bread company fall hostage to a war abroad and the Strait of Hormuz blockade?
First the back story.
The beginning
Ludhiana, 1978. A young homemaker, Rajni Bector, borrows INR20,000 from her husband, Dharamvir, and sets up a small unit making ice creams. She names the brand Cremica, short for “Cream Ka.”
Within a decade, the bakery she built alongside turns out 50,000 loaves of bread a day, and Cremica quietly becomes the supplier to some of India’s most familiar tastes – burger buns for McDonald’s outlets across North and East India, biscuits for the canteens of the Ministry of Defence, contract manufacturing of cookies for global snack brands.
The company lists on the stock exchange in December 2020. Rajni Bector receives the Padma Shri a year later. Today, her company ships biscuits and bread to more than 70 countries, many of them now sitting uneasily close to a war zone
Growth without gains
Anoop Bector, who now runs the business as managing director, in the recent earning calls said: “FY26 marks a significant milestone for Mrs. Bectors Foods. We have crossed the INR2,000 crore revenue mark, a goal we had set our sights on and are proud to have achieved it.”
On the surface, the numbers look reassuring.
Revenue has doubled from INR988 crore in FY22 to INR2,044 crore in FY26, a strong 20% CAGR. The biscuits segment grew at 20% annually over four years, while bakery did even better at 23%.
But dig deeper and the cracks begin to show.
In FY26, revenue grew 9.1% to INR2,043.6 crore. Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) rose just 2.5% to INR257. 7 crore. Profit after tax (PAT) stood at INR140. 9 crore, with margins at a modest 6.9%. The PAT margins have come down from 8.6% in 2024 to 6.9% now.
While the company is selling more than before but earning less on every rupee.
Cremica biscuits, the business that built the company, grew just 6.7% for the full year, squeezed by US tariffs that at its peak hit 50%, a pricing skirmish among Indian biscuit makers after the GST overhaul, and now, a war that has found its way into Bector’s freight bills. On the rising raw-material costs, Anoop Bector mentioned: “On the raw material side, there has been inflation, especially which comes from palm oil and crude and also from our packaging material. So, these are actually three major impacts which have come in.”
To put a number to the current impact, Anoop said “it’s about 3%, including some of the impact from minimum wages steep revision in UP…now we are hearing in Karnataka also [minimum wages will be hiked]”. The upward revision in fuel prices could also push the company’s expenses higher. The company says it has clawed the impact back through price hikes and cost efficiencies to stand still on margin.
To be sure, pricing is everything in India’s fiercely competitive biscuit market. A small shift, say from INR4. 5 to INR5 per pack, can change buying behaviour overnight. That’s exactly what happened post GST overhaul, when some competitors chose to stick to lower price points. “We moved to INR5 but some large players continued at INR4. 50. That impacted us,” Anoop added.
Exports hit by war
If domestic competition is one challenge, global markets are another. Bector Food’s exports to over 70 countries, once a major strength, has now turned into vulnerability. The West Asia conflict has disrupted logistics and increased freight costs. At the same time, US tariffs, once as high as 50%, hurt export demand. “It made it hard for importers to sustain price points,” the management said.
Exports grew only in low single digit last year.
“A bit on the West Asia, minor impact will be there. Only majority two of our markets have been impacted, which are Bahrain and Kuwait,” the company said. It is still delivering to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar by rerouting shipments.
The bakery business which is home to the popular English Oven brand has been the company’s growth engine. It delivered 14% growth in FY26, outperforming biscuits.
But even here, momentum is fading. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the slide has been hard to miss,16% growth in the second quarter, 13% in the third and just 9% in the fourth quarter of FY26. Bector explains that it is due to festival and not a trend. “We are largely a North-based business. This time, January and February went very well. So, Navaratri was in March, and last year it was in April. During the festival, devout households across North India fast and avoid eggs and non-vegetarian food, denting bread sales for the season. That’s a seasonal cyclic thing, which happened in the last quarter. There is nothing to do with the business trend,” Anoop added.
Chasing 14% Ebitda margin
There is one figure the company has been promising its investors for several quarters now — 14% Ebitda margin — only to fall just short of it every time.
FY26 closed at 12.6%. When asked if the 14% target was still realistic, Anoop Bector said, “Objective is to get as close as possible to 14%, but you must appreciate the kind of disruptive inflationary impact, which have been there, which we have done our best to cover up.”
The market has already accounted for the worst. From an all-time high of roughly INR439 in September 2024, Bector’s stock had slipped to around INR180 by late May 2026 – a fall of nearly 60% even as revenues climbed every single year through that stretch. The PAT margin sliding from 8.6% to 6.9% has done more harm to investor sentiment than a 20% four-year revenue CAGR has done to support it.
The road ahead
Today, the company is placing some genuinely interesting bets. English Oven has pushed into Kolkata and Hyderabad, with a new plant commissioned in Kolkata in January 2026 and another in Mumbai now ramping up. NaturBaked, the company’s clean-label, high-protein bread brand, is nearing an annualised revenue run-rate of roughly INR10 crore.
Instead of expanding aggressively across India, the company is focusing on regions within 400 km of its plants. Currently present in over 700,000 outlets, the company plans to scale to 1 million outlets by 2030.
Nearly five decades after Rajni Bector first lit her backyard oven, the biscuits still keep dipping into chai and the buns keep shaping burgers across 70 countries. What has changed is the question investors are asking, not whether Bector Food’s can grow, but whether it can finally turn that growth into the money it makes.
