Grupo Bimbo S.A.B. de C.V. was founded in 1945 by a group of businessmen led by Lorenzo Servitje Sendra as a baking and distribution business in Mexico City. The idea for the business came from his upbringing helping his Catalan immigrant father run a pastry shop in the Mexican capital. Moreover, along with other partners in Mexico of Catalan roots, the business quickly grew after expanding to other cities such as a huge warehouse they built in Puebla towards the end of the 1940s. Nevertheless, it was in the late 1950s when they built a bake processing plant in Guadalajara and another one in Monterrey that the business expanded tremendously employing a formidable distribution network with a reach to cover the entire country. Today, the company is a giant Mexican multinational being one of the country’s blue chips listed in Mexico along with constituting also a constituent of the stock market index there known as the IPC. Likewise, the Mexican multinational is the owner of several prominent brands comprising the biggest bread maker the world has today with massive sales expected to reach $ 15 billion this year. In fact, having a staggering total workforce of some 130,000 employees belonging to various nations globally and 165 baking mills dispersed widely around the world after sizable acquisitions, the company has a solid presence in several countries including China, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Great Britain, America, Canada and nearly all of Latin America.
Furthermore, after engaging in an aggressive acquisition spree upon entering the new century, the big push of the company catapulting it as the biggest bread maker worldwide came after two acquisitions. These acquisitions were the American unit of the Canadian food processor known as George Weston Limited back in 2009 and the entire baking division of Sara Lee Corporation in 2011.
To conclude, I think Grupo Bimbo is a prominent Mexican champion making the nation proud. In fact, being led by Daniel Servitje Montull who has appeared in previous Forbes’ billionaires rankings, is the son of the company’s main founder and has an MBA from Stanford University after having been groomed for the position, the company has the capacity to keep on expanding organically as well as through strategic acquisitions enabling it to retain its status as the biggest bread maker and purchaser of wheat-flour in the world for decades to come.