Gardenia sets 50% hike in bread output

Gardenia Bakeries Philippines Inc. expects to increase the capacity of its production facility by as much as 50 percent to a total of 450,000 loaves a day with the completion of its P1-billion plant expansion this year.

This new capital outlay will not only allow Gardenia to corner a hefty 70 percent of the P8.5-billion packaged bread market, but also expand the existing local packaged bread supply by another 35 percent, explained Gardenia Bakeries Philippines president Simplicio P. Umali Jr.

This new, fully automated facility alone, which will be the sixth bread factory within the Gardenia complex in Laguna, is expected to produce a total of 150,000 loaves per day. This additional production will serve the whole of Luzon, from Cagayan Valley to Sorsogon province.

Gardenia, however, targets to produce an initial 50,000 loaves this year before it ramps up production to its maximum capacity in three years, depending on how fast the market expands.

Last year, the total bread market grew by 2.5 percent in value and 2.8 percent in volume and is projected to grow at a faster pace this year of about 4 percent, Umali said.

“We also want to expand the bread market with this new plant because Filipinos’ consumption of bread is much lower than that of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. It was estimated that a Filipino family consumes only less than a third of a loaf bread per month … We want to increase consumption of wheat products,” Umali said.

“To increase that consumption, we also need to improve distribution, make the product more available, and introduce more variants including low priced variants like the Neubake, which is 50 centavos cheaper than Pinoy Tasty at P36 per loaf,” he added.

According to Umali, Gardenia was looking to expand its bread distribution coverage, and make Gardenia products more easily accessible and available to consumers.