The next step the new owner should take is to get the demolition permit for the 115-year old plant from the Brasov City Hall, but has not submitted the necessary papers yet.
Mondelez, which also owns the Poiana chocolate plant on Strada de Mijloc in Brasov, has recently sold the Cibo facility to German-held retailer Lidl, which in turn plans to sell part of the plot and use the rest for a new store.
The plant takes up about one hectare of land. Usually, when a company wants to sell a plant it has to secure all the necessary demolition permits to strike a deal with the new owner.
The plant on Alexandru Ioan Cuza Street in Brasov was founded in 1899 and used to make chocolate products. In 1954, it merged with the plant that would become today’s Poiana and the newly created entity at the time was state-owned. After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, it changed name to Poiana Produse Zaharoase (Poiana Sugary Products) and Kraft Foods, now Mondelez Romania, bought it in 1994.
Back in the Kraft days, the Cibo plant was making chocolates. It was the first sweets plant in Transylvania and one of the oldest in Romania. The oldest chocolate plant in the country is Kandia’s facility in Timisoara, founded 1890, whose operations were relocated to Bucharest in the 2000’s, according to publicly available information.
After closing the Cibo plant in 2006 and the Poiana plant in 2009, Mondelez moved production to Bulgaria, so the Romanian brand Poiana is now made in one of the two facilities the US company owns in that country.
Mondelez is one of the leading sweets and coffee companies in Romania, having posted about EUR130 million revenue in 2012 (according to the latest official data). Only two large chocolate plants remain in Romania today, Kandia in Bucharest and Heidi Chocolat in Pantelimon, near the capital city, both held by Austria’s Meinl.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)