Don Don, a regional bakery group founded in Slovenia but active throughout the Western Balkans, will open a new production facility in the eastern Serbian town of Zajecar in spring 2018, Ales Mozetic, general manager of Don Don, told Ekapija business portal.

Don Don was founded in Slovenia in 1993 but today has production units in Croatia and Serbia, and is also present in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. In April 2014, equity fund KJK acquired a 25% stake in the company, with the proceeds invested in further expansion, supporting the acquisition of bakery Pekarna Grosuplje from Slovenian retailer Mercator in April 2015 as well as organic expansion. 

The Pekarna Grosuplje deal was “an important step towards the consolidation of a market suffering from fragmentation and inefficiencies”, said the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which supported the acquisition with a €10mn loan. 

Since then Don Don had continued to grow, and the new production facility in Zajecar will be its ninth in Serbia, where it has been operating since 2008. 

The agreement on the lease for 1,000 square metres of space in Zajacar was signed on April 21. The company announced earlier that it plans to invest €500,000 in equipment and infrastructure for the Zajecar facility and to hire around 40 employees, Ekapija reported.

Currently, Don Don has production facilities in the central Serbian towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo, northern Subotica and Zrenjanin, southern Nis and Leskovac as well as in the villages of Jakovo and Pudarci near the capital Belgrade.

Most recently, in June it opened a toast factory in Kragujevac, investing €10mn. The toast production centre will supply all the markets in the region, and the company emphasises that no similar factory exists within an 800km radius. The realisation of the project took about two years and the work done by companies from Serbia, Austria, Germany, Italy and Slovenia, Ekapija reported on September 20.