This was the ninth consecutive year of growth for the bread maker which said in 2018 it was investing RON12 million in a new industrial bakery in Bucharest.
Vel Pitar posted a net profit of RON43.9 million in 2019, down 21% on the year.
It had an average number of 2,269 employees in 2019.
Vel Pitar is the leading bakery business in Romania, founded in 2001 from the merger of four industrial bakeries. It currently has 12 production units in ten Romanian cities.
Romania’s local bread and bakery industry is among the least profitable in Europe despite similar production costs.
Romania makes 1.5 million tons of bread per year.
Bread consumption per capita in Romania stood at 96.5 kilos per year in 2019, above the EU average of 60 kilos per capita. Statistics also show Romania imports 900,000 tons of frozen bread per year.
The local milling and bakery sector, which includes around 6,000 companies, reaches around RON10 billion (EUR2 billion) a year in a food market of around EUR10 billion a year.