Haldiram's: from a Bikaner sweet shop to a $10 billion global snack brand

Public brand story. Compiled from publicly available reporting. This company is not a USAIS Global client; its trademarks belong to their owners. We tell these stories because they show what a U.S. presence does to a brand.

Before America

Haldiram's began in 1937 as a small bhujia shop in Bikaner, Rajasthan. By the 2000s it dominated Indian snacking, but internationally it was still a nostalgia purchase, shipped to Indian grocery stores abroad and bought almost entirely by the diaspora.

The U.S. move

The United States changed the trajectory in two stages. First came decades of exports into Indian-American retail, a beachhead that proved the products travelled. Then came the deliberate step most exporters never take: pushing past the diaspora aisle into mainstream American retail, with U.S.-market packaging, U.S. distribution relationships, and shelf space at retailers like Costco, Walmart and Amazon.

American sales did more than add revenue. They demonstrated to investors that an Indian snack maker could win outside India.

What happened

FY2024 revenue	over ₹12,500 crore (~US$1.5B)
March 2025	Temasek acquires ~10% at a US$10 billion valuation
2025	IHC and Alpha Wave Global follow with a further ~6%
Status	the largest deal ever in Indian packaged foods

Temasek's investment, the largest in India's packaged-food industry, was explicitly tied to expansion plans led by the U.S. and Middle East markets.

The lesson for exporters

• Diaspora demand is a beachhead, not a destination. The valuation event came from mainstream U.S. retail, not ethnic-aisle exports.
• The U.S. market is a credibility engine. Winning American shelf space repriced the whole company for global investors.
• India has no U.S. treaty visa: an Indian promoter building this presence personally needs the corporate route (L-1A → EB-1C), which makes early structure decisive.