Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI:It measured 70 square metres — smaller than many Indian drawing rooms. It stood on a Frankfurt street where nobody spoke his language. And on its shelves sat the things Indians abroad ache for and cannot find: the right dal, the right masala, rice that fills a kitchen with the smell of home the moment the lid comes off.
The year was 1980. Pawan Kumar Bhandari had just arrived in Germany. He had no inherited wealth, no distribution network, no market survey telling him that Europe would one day want what he was selling. He had a shopfront and a belief that the taste of a country travels with its people.
Forty-six years later, that shopfront has become a continental enterprise. GFT Group — Global Foods Trading — supplies more than 9,800 businesses in 29 European countries. It moves over 10,000 containers a year. It runs 38 lorries of its own from eight distribution centres in six nations, carries a catalogue of more than 4,000 products and employs a team of over 300. It sources through an office in Gurugram and stores 30,000 tonnes of rice in a purposebuilt centre in Hesse. Today it ranks among Europe’s foremost importers of South and Southeast Asian foods.
Twenty-One Years, Four Buildings By 1983 the shop had outgrown itself and become a 320 square metre warehouse at MörfeldenWalldorf. Two years later Bhandari took the decision that changed the shape of the business. He stopped buying through middlemen and began importing directly from India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Direct import meant carrying the cost of a full container long before a single sack was sold. It also opened a phase of 40 per cent growth a year. In 1991 the operation moved again, to a 520 square metre warehouse in Mörfelden fitted with high-rack storage. Ten years on came the leap that altered every dimension of the business. In 2001, GFT built a purposedesigned 15,000 square metre warehouse at Biebesheim am Rhein, and took its place among the largest Asian wholesalers in Germany. Twenty-one years. Four buildings. Each one larger than the last.
With the German base secure, the map began to widen. Spain came first. In 2004 a subsidiary opened at Barcelona, covering Spain, Portugal, southern France and the Balearics. France followed in 2013, with a Paris distribution centre running its own fleet of lorries. In 2014 the group entered the United Kingdom, the largest Indian market on the continent. In 2017 it acquired Sidhu Foods in the Netherlands, adding a Benelux platform.
The network today runs through Riedstadt, Munich, Berlin, Orly, NieuwVennep, London Southall, Barcelona and Palmela. Holding it together is the Gurugram office, which keeps the entire chain anchored to Indian soil.
In 1993 he launched SCHANI, the group’s own label, and began production in-house — spice blends, sauces, chutneys, and later a frozen convenience range. Three decades on, Schani stands among the most trusted Indian food brands in Europe. Others followed. Around these own labels sit more than 40 partner brands, held on exclusive or priority European distribution.
In 2026 the headquarters formally shifted from Biebesheim am Rhein to Riedstadt-Wolfskehlen — the fourth home in 46 years.
On 16 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in The Hague, on the second leg of a five-nation European tour and his second visit to the Netherlands. He also addressed a large gathering of the Indian community. PM Modi set the community’s achievements inside the larger national project — India’s journey towards becoming a developed nation, Viksit Bharat, by 2047.
Bhandari was in that hall. At the World Forum, The Hague, he joined fellow business leaders in discussions on cross-border partnership and sustainable growth, and met the PM Modi briefly during the programme. A man who left India in 1980 with a shopkeeper’s ambition stood, 46 years later, before the Prime Minister of the country he had left — not as a petitioner, but as one of the builders of the very bridge the Prime Minister was describing.
Enterprises built by one person usually end with that person. This one has not. Manav Bhandari, the founder’s son, joined the business in 2010 and now leads it as chief executive. Parul Saigal, the founder’s daughter, returned in 2020 after 13 years in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, having gone out to learn the trade elsewhere before bringing it home. The founder remains at the head of the group he made.
