Ceylon Biscuits Limited
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Formerly called
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Williams Confectionery Limited |
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| Industry | Food |
| Founded | 1939 (Dehiwela) |
| Founder | Simon Arthur Wickramasingha |
| Headquarters | Pannipitiya, Colombo, Sri Lanka |
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Area served
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International |
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Key people
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Mineka Wickramasingha (Group Chairman) Ramya Wickramasingha (Deputy Chairman) |
| Products | Biscuits Chocolate Cakes Jelly Snacks Soya Based Products Cereal Products Organic Products Soups |
| Brands |
Munchee (biscuits) Ritzbury (chocolate) Tiara (cakes) Lanka Soy (soya products) Nutriline (breakfast cereals) Go Jelly (jellies) Samaayu (herbal porridge) Rasa Hari (soups) Cecil (fruits and nuts) Hi Tapper (treacle and jaggery) Ramba (snack foods) |
| Subsidiaries |
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| Website | www |
Ceylon Biscuits Limited (branded CBL, Commonly called Munchee) is a Sri Lankan food manufacturer, the maker of Munchee biscuits and one of the oldest biscuit makers in Sri Lanka. The company owns 60% of domestic market share in Sri Lanka.
In the 1930s Simon Arthur Wickramasingha (1902-1961) acquired a small factory that produced handmade biscuits from a local businessman called Williams. In 1939 the company Williams Confectionery Limited was formally established in Dehiwela with ten employees. In 1957 the factory was upgraded and mechanised, with Baker Perkins manufacturing lines imported from the UK. Wickramasingha's four sons, N. P. (Pali), R. L. (Ranjith), M. P. (Mineka), and R. S. (Ramya), took over the business when their father died in 1961.
In the 1960s the Ministry of Education, with the assistance of the US based organisation CARE, provided school children with a cup of milk and a bun as nutritional supplements to their midday meal. However, due to the inability to maintain the quality of the bun, CARE began assessing alternatives, eventually settling on biscuits. Mineka Wickramasingha successfully obtained the contract.
As the existing factory in Dehiwala was restricted in its capacity the company in July 1968 opened a new biscuit factory at Pannipitiya to produce the high-protein biscuit for CARE. The factory was operated by Ceylon Biscuits Limited, a newly created subsidiary of Williams (Williams owned 30%, the Wickramasingha family 30%, E. B. Creasy (an English trading company) 30%, the workers 5% and other shareholders 5%). CBL imported two biscuit manufacturing lines from Germany, one for the nutritional biscuit and the other for consumer biscuit production. CBL's involvement with the school biscuit programme continued until 1988, when the programme was terminated. With the introduction of the second plant CBL intoroduced a range of biscuits to the market under the brand name, Munchee. These included two of its own innovations, Hawaiian Cookies and Milk Short Cake, together with generic biscuits nice, ginger and date biscuits.
In the early 1980s the company imported a third (hard dough) manufacturing line. In 1981 they entered into a partnership arrangement with Associated Biscuits (AB), with AB purchasing E. B. Creasy's 30% equity in the company. As a result of this partnership and the new manufacturing line CBL was able to produce Huntley & Palmers' cream crackers and wafers, together with its own line of cream crackers and wafers. The company then purchased a second hard dough manufacturing line from AB. In 1982 Nabisco acquired Associated Biscuits, which maintained its ongoing relationship with CBL. Through Nabisco CBL was able to purchase another soft dough biscuit line, which it used to produce a new line of cream biscuits. The relationship ended when Nabisco sold its shares in CBL to a Hong Kong-based investor.
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Wikipedia