Nagpur: The LPG crisis has left biscuit and bread makers crumbling. A Parle G facility at Khamgaon in Buldhana has shut due to want of cooking gas and other units are working at drastically low levels. Even companies that make bread, which perishes faster than biscuits, are feeling the heat, said sources.TOI contacted a cross-section of biscuit manufacturing units, where the management confirmed a tightrope walk. Top sources in companies like Haldiram’s, Dinshaws and Ajit Bakery spoke of the LPG crisis affecting bread making, which is a daily-need product. At some places, even the laminates in which the products are packaged are in short supply or have become too costly. Made of polymers, which are petroleum products, the Iran crisis has impacted availability of packaging material and hiked prices too.Nagpur has three major units making biscuits. SAJ Foods, which makes the Bisk Farm brand, is running its unit at Butibori at 30% capacity. The company has four units in West Bengal and one each in Bangalore and Nagpur and everywhere, the production has been slashed drastically, sources said. The Bangalore unit is trying to stay afloat by using piped natural gas. All units clubbed make 14,000 tons of biscuit in a month, a source said.Another unit catering to a national brand has reduced production by 70%. In the normal course it made 60 tons of biscuits a day catering to a leading brand. In some of the units, there is also a shortage of food chemicals like sodium bicarbonate and ammonium bicarbonate, a key ingredient, a source said.Biscuit makers may have shut plants or reduced production, but it may still take a month for consumers to feel the impact. The dealers maintain a stock of a month to 20 days, said a source in the business. However, this may not hold for bread, which is a daily-use product. Vikram Diwadkar, director of Ajit Bakery, said bread-making operations have been impacted considerably due to the crisis. “Even during Covid-19 pandemic, bakers kept up production. However, currently it’s getting difficult. Even rates of laminates have gone up from Rs 230/kg to as much as Rs 289-300/kg taking up packaging rates,” he said.A source at Dinshaws said bread making has been hit by 15% and the company has been able to maintain the supply. At Haldiram’s, a source in the management said the impact was more in its restaurant chains, as alternate fuels are used in the plants, although breads have been affected to a certain extent.
