From a shop in Hathras to a family of companies

Kundan Lal Bhagat ji and his son Gopal Das ji, with the combined family behind them, turned a shop dealing in compound hing, colour and gulal into a small factory. Three trades that most people would have kept apart were put under one roof, because grinding, blending, and knowing by eye and by hand when a batch is right is the same craft whether what comes out of it is asafoetida or gulal.

By 1967 the works had outgrown itself and was rebuilt at scale, and the range widened into new varieties of colour packaging and hing packaging. That is the first appearance of the pattern that explains everything after it: this family has grown as much by changing the pack as by changing what goes in it.

Shyam Behari ji and Ratan Behari ji entered with ideas the trade had not seen. Packaging styles were redrawn, materials changed on the back of the best technology then available, and the hing was bought where it grows, imported directly from Afghanistan and other countries. Buying at source is what tells you what is in every sack.

Ratan Behari ji's initials went on the colour company. RB Colour, sold under the bird on the pack, is the name Indian trade has used ever since: Cock Brand. The hing business traded under the same initials, as RB Hing Co.

Manu Garg took Cock Brand colour and gulal, and Gopal and Baby hing, to a height they had not reached before across the Hathras units, through product development and dealer relationships in equal measure. A festival business lives or dies on distribution, because the entire year's demand arrives in a fortnight and the goods have to already be on the shelf when it does.

The network built in those years now runs past ten thousand names, and it is the reason a new product from the group reaches an Indian shop within a season.

Shantanu Garg started the Meva Bite dry fruit range at the Delhi unit, in pack formats built for a different kind of shop from the one that buys gulal by the sack, and widened hing distribution alongside it. Two businesses sharing a family, a discipline and nothing at all on the shelf.

Kartikey Garg then pointed the trade both ways across the border: dry fruit imported, colour and gulal exported, with quality control in bulk production tightened to match what a foreign buyer's inspection asks for. In the same period the group's full range went into a mobile application, so every item the family makes could be ordered from a phone.

Sagar Ratan Garg joined at twenty-two and put enterprise planning to work on the structure itself: the family's companies restructured as a conglomerate, with responsibility for each part written down. Digital marketing and the online platforms followed: the same goods, in the places a buyer now looks first.

The group now runs as separate companies with one family behind them: Garg Global Innovative Limited for colour, water gadgets and toys; Garg Global Spices Private Limited — formerly RB Hing Co. — for asafoetida; and K.G. Overseas Private Limited for Meva Bite dry fruit.