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The President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, honoured the president of Dan Cake with the insignia of Grand Officer of Industrial Merit last Wednesday, on the day the company celebrated its 40th birthday.
Based in Póvoa de Santa Iria, in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira, Dan Cake, which manufactures cookies, butter cookies, biscuits, toasts, Swiss rolls and family cakes, was created on October 17, 1978 by Mozambican Kantilal Jamnadas, the man honoured by President de Sousa.
After a visit to the premises of Dan Cake, where about 32,000 tons of branded products are produced annually, Marcelo gave a speech in which he praised the journey of Kantilal Jamnadas, whom he met for the first time in Mozambique while still young.
“He was already, as he would later show, for decades of life, a business leader. He is a dreamer, a family man who likes to serve the community,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Jamnadas had already been granted the Commendation of Business Merit by the former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio but the current head of state says, “it is fair to go further”.
“Today I am going to hand you the insignia of the Grand Officer of Industrial Merit, which means that your recognition has not stopped at the Commendation but continues to progress. Who knows, I may have the opportunity to deliver the Great Cross by the end of your career, which will not be today,” President de Sousa said.
Dan Cake has two factories in Portugal and employs around 500 people.
“Cakes and biscuits from Portugal are either no good or are cheap”
Kantilal Jamnadas, the president and founder of the company, was born in the mid-1940s in Mozambique and began working with his father when he was 12 years old. At age 15, however, in 1961, the young Kantilal was left alone with his older brother because his Indian father and mother were among the two thousand repatriated to India after the Indian state annexed Goa.
After 25 April 1974, Jamnadas, born in Mozambique, was one of the thousands of Indian Hindus, who, with the independence of the African country, chose to continue their life in Portugal.
Arriving in Portugal, Kantilal continued to work in the food industry and in 1978 founded Dan Cake, which quickly became one of the leading Portuguese pastry manufacturers of the 1980s.
Jamnadas told Portuguese journalist Nuno Guedes in 2017 that his biggest challenge had been not adapting to Portugal but the entry of the country into the then European Economic Community and competition from Spain, where costs were much lower.
One of the solutions was to export, but the reception abroad was never good. “In any country,” he says, “customers told us that ‘cakes and cookies from Portugal are either no good or cheap'”.
For years, Dan Cake sold its products abroad below cost, but the entrepreneur says that the strategy was correct and has the numbers to back it up. “We are present in 70 countries now, and in markets as demanding as the USA, Japan and South Korea”.
Besides his prominence in cakes and biscuits, Kantilal Jamnadas is also one of the most visible of the 6,000 or so Hindus living in Portugal.
Formally, the Hindu Community of Portugal, which is based in Lisbon’s Lumiar neighbourhood and houses the only statue in the world of Mahatma Gandhi accompanied by his wife, was born in 1976 because of the death of a young man.
India’s largest religion demands that the dead be cremated, and when the Hindus from Mozambique arrived in Portugal, cremation was prohibited.
Kantilal explains that, with the traditional Portuguese openness, that particular problem was resolved, but the community became organised and continues to this day to try to maintain its traditions, “although the great majority of Hindus in Portugal are Portuguese and feel at home”. “If we had gone to India,” he says, “it would have been much more difficult”.
On the occasion of Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa’s visit to India, in January 2017, the president of the Hindu Community stressed that this was a good opportunity for Portugal, and that the Indian economy was growing at a great speed and represented more than one billion people.
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