All in the Family: Global Food Empire Began Over a Mexico City Counter Worldcrunch
December 16, 2013

CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera talks with current CEO Daniel Servitje of the world largest bread producer about his plans to acquire brand names and grow his company. (CNBC)

MEXICO CITY — Roberto Servitje, co-founder and former president of the Mexican bread and pastry giant Bimbo, is upright and elegant at 85 years old. He has plenty to stand tall about, having started a company with his brother 68 years ago that remains successful and in the family.

At a time when Mexican producers and household brands have been merging into multinational concerns, Bimbo has survived as a purely Mexican company. The Servitje brothers — Lorenzo being the other founder — resisted a veritable “siege” from foreign buyers to achieve this. One of the United States’ most important bread companies once warned them to “sell or face destruction,” says Roberto, laughing as he recalls those days.

Then the head of an investment bank asked them to sell most of their shares in the firm, insisting, everything has “a price in this world, give me a number.” Roberto responded by asking, “How much is your mother worth?” That was when the brothers decided they must expand abroad. They bought baking plants in San Diego and Los Angeles in the 1990s, and companies such as Mrs. Baird’s, a century-old Texas bakery. The U.S.-based Bimbo Bakeries was founded to run operations in the United States.

In fact, Roberto oversaw the group’s international expansion over previous decades and notes that Bimbo, one of the best-known household pastry names in the Hispanic world, benefited little from the 1994 NAFTA free-trade treaty, because it began exporting a decade earlier. Bimbo now has warehouses in 16 countries, including China, Brazil and the United States, its most important market where it began selling bread in 1984.

Read the rest at Worldcrunch

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