These Lebanese cereal experts added baked chips and baked tortilla chips to their SNIPS brand with help from Reading Bakery Systems.

Starting in Lebanon in 1998, what is now the Difco Group opened the first and only cereal factory in the Middle East. The mission? Make high-quality cereal accessible to all. At the time, the only available cereal product options were foreign brands with limited distribution.

Today, Difco Group consists of four companies, two manufacturing facilities, 500+ employees and two successful brands – Poppins breakfast cereals and breakfast bars, and SNIPS baked salty snacks. Between them, the brands comprise more than 800 SKUs distributed across the Middle East and Africa.

Producing all of those SKUs are two state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities. The first opened in Mansoura, Lebanon in 2006. This 20,000-square-meter plant was upgraded in 2018 to produce muesli- and granola-based products, and is today dedicated to manufacturing Poppins brand products. The second facility opened in Ferzol, Lebanon, in 2018 to support the launch of the SNIPS snack line, a project that began a few years earlier.

Read about their journey of moving into baked snacks with this free white paper from Reading Bakery Systems.