“We’ve had high single digit growth in Romania in the past seven years and the trend continues,” says Franco del Fabbro, the Italian manager who has been running Heidi Chocolat, the largest local chocolate exporter, since mid-2014.
The market has seen single-digit decline this year mostly because of the long hot summer. Heidi has every reason to believe it will achieve 50% growth by 2020 and account for 10% of the chocolate tablet market from the current 7%, del Fabbro added.
He attended the inauguration of the 1,000 square meter expansion of the factory in Pantelimon, which cost the company 7 million lei (EUR1.6 million) and started operations two weeks ago.
Austrian banker Julius Meinl the fifth, the owner of the Austrian Meinl Bank and of the two major chocolate factories in Romania (Heidi and Kandia) participated at the inauguration, as well.
“It’s unbelievable how Heidi – and implicitly Romania – got to where it is today, given that the communist regime was overthrown not long ago,” Meinl said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)