FLAVOUR OF SUCCESS Sweden’s largest bakery, Pågen AB, was founded by an entrepreneur and has been passed down through several generations of the family, always growing and expanding its range of products.
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ågen dates back to 1878, when Anders Påhlsson and his wife Matilda started a small bakery in Malmö, Sweden. Though just one of many such businesses it did so well that in 1903 it opened the country’s first industrial bakery. As Malmö grew over the next 50 years from 35,000 inhabitants to more than 250,000, so did the business. In the 1950s, Pågen became the first bakery to distribute its products nationally and then the first to export bread and other bakery products.
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Today, Pågen is the bakery business of Pågen Gruppen AB, under which come several related businesses including a flour mill that supplies much, though not all, of the bakery’s raw material. The firm employs around 1400 people at its three factories, two in Malmö and one near Göteborg.
Rivals unite Pågen was already well ahead of all its competitors when, in 2000, it decided to restructure the business radically. For many
years its Göteborg factory, Pååls Bageri, had been run as a separate business, duplicating many of Pågen’s products and encouraged to compete with its sister company. The thinking behind this was that the internal competition was an exciting challenge for both companies, but the market had changed, and it made sense to merge these companies into one strong entity to meet the growing centralisation and internationalisation in the supermarket and grocery chains.
