The Pannonian Plain is a vast lowland, rich with quality soil, located at the central part of Europe, and as such has always been one of the most important croplands in the Old Continent.

In 19th century the flour was produced in dry mills (suvača) – the horse-driven mills, the number of which, at the time, surpassed 50,000 in the Pannonian Plain.

Banat had already been famous for the quality of its wheat, and in Kikinda only, one of the most important towns in Banat, as many as 51 dry mills were working. Nowadays, in the entire Europe, there are only three dry mills: in Hungary, Croatia, and one in Serbia, which is located in Kikinda.

Legend has it that our flour was of such quality, that even Maria Theresa, the Austro-Hungarian Queen, during the course of her reign, ordered a railroad to be constructed, connecting the Pannonian rich cropland with the rest of Austro-Hungarian Empire, in order to transport the flour from Kikinda all the way to Vienna.

With the construction of this railroad, the eastern and western parts of Europe were connected, and the famous railway route emerged – the Orient Express, which connected London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Athens, Sofia and Istanbul, passing through Kikinda.

One of the most successful organisations at the time in former Yugoslavia, was the Industrial and Agricultural Plant “Banat” and its “Uglješa Terzin” factory in Kikinda, which was dealing with flour production.

Therefore, it was decided that, right next to the flour factory, one more factory should be opened, this time for dessert production.

At the same time, at the “Stevan Lakai – Giga” high school in Kikinda, an education profile for the food processing technician in the production of biscuits and waffles emerged.

The generation born in 1962 was the first one to be purposely educated for the dessert factory in Kikinda. Few years later, they became our first employees.

Hard work on the construction was already taking place in Kikinda, so the time had come to conceptualise the desserts that were going to be produced in the new factory.

That is why we decided to visit the Netherlands, and to bring home the “G. J. JOOSTEN” production line as well as the Dutch recipes for cake production.

The factory was completed and first employees started to work.

At the very beginning we were a small collective of 30 workers.

The first test-desserts that we were making at the time did not have a name, but the employees called them “flying saucers” due to their round shape and size.

Made to a Dutch recipe, they were filled with raw almond paste coming from the Netherlands, which wasn’t to the domestic customers’ taste.

Industrial and Agricultural Plant “Banat“ continued issuing a directive that the desserts should be produced every day, regardless of the recipe, so the unsold “flying saucer“ desserts were really flying all over Kikinda.

There were so many of them, that everyone enjoyed their unusual taste – from the inhabitants in Kikinda to their close and distant relatives, friends and domestic animals.

When we decided to become independent in 1985, and to separate from the factory “Uglješa Terzin”, under whose umbrella we had been doing business until that moment,  it was necessary to find a name for the new factory.

Therefore we launched a competition, and surprisingly received 62 suggestions.

The name “Kiko“ was suggested by two participants – Ivan and Miroslava from Kikinda. We awarded them with desserts matching the winners’ weight.

According to our godparents, the name “Kiko“ occurred to them as a combination of the words Kikinda and cakes (“Kolači”).

Everything we had learned in the Netherlands was applied to our first three desserts – they were named Vanja, Ana and Vesna.

They had a rich marzipan filling, and were covered with the almond leaves and full of blanched raw almond crumbles – altogether, they were quite complicated, expensive for production and they weren’t exactly to the local consumers’ taste.

Those were the challenging times for our production, accompanied by the unsatisfactory sales performances.

In order to adjust the taste of desserts to the local consumers, it was necessary to modify their recipes.

We have always insisted on the quality of ingredients that we have been using.
We were lucky to have in our factory’s property in Mokrin, a village near Kikinda, the perennial plantations with over 6,000 apple, cherry and quince trees.

That is how the best fruits from Mokrin were transformed into a porridge that we used to fill our desserts with.

The desserts were adjusted to the local consumers’ taste, and our factory had achieved a tremendous success!

Camaraderie in the working collective was at the highest level – we were socialising both at the work and after the work. Maybe that was exactly a reason why our factory was chosen to be visited by the Relay of Youth in Kikinda!

Day of Youth was a Yugoslav festivity marking the birthday of then President Tito. The main symbol of this holiday was a relay, carried throughout the entire Yugoslavia for longer than a month, in order to be eventually delivered to Tito, on the day of his birthday  – May 25, at a spectacular rally in Belgrade.

Every time, the relay was departing from a different Republic and, along its way to Belgrade, stopped in several cities. The last Relay of Youth in 1987 passed through Kikinda and visited our factory. We welcomed it appropriately: dressed in folk costumes, with songs and dance.

The Relay of Youth enabled us to become a part of history.

The first Yugoslav advertising agency “Studio marketing Delo” from Slovenia, helped us to modernise and to become recognisable throughout the country.

We were named “Banini“, after a Banat plain, where we are located.

The first logotype was designed, and our products got their new names and the special packaging.

We wanted to share this important news with you, so we recorded our first television commercial.

Now all our cookies got their new names and new packaging, and we created our slogan “Sweeter side of the world” which some of you maybe are still remember!

Those days we recorded a new commercial with Marta Keler who was born in Kikinda.

Marta was a leading actress in the movie “Virdžina”, the most popular domestic movie of that year, and some people remember our commercial even today, as one of the best from the early 1990’s.

Children of our employees also appeared in the commercial, alongside Marta, thus helping us to send a message of peace and love.

For the production of the first “Rum kasato” we imported a machine from Denmark, which was manufactured long before, in 1943. It was a blender that we used for mixing the pastry and rum.

During the first couple of test-productions we used to mix the pastry with real rum and poured cocoa syrup over it.

In a well-measured and a bit pirate manner, a litre of rum went to 70 kilograms of pastry.

“Rum kasato” had become so immensely popular that our machine was working without a break in three shifts every day. And it still is! The only difference is that, due to legal regulations, we started to use rum aromas instead of real rum.

Wishing to donate to our city of Kikinda something really special, we opened “Magic tree” confectionery store, which was at the time, one of the most modern ones in the entire country.

In addition to “Banini” desserts, our fellow townsmen had a chance to taste the pastry, various desserts, as well as ice creams made with the real extracts and to the Italian recipes.

“Magic tree” had quickly become a favourite meeting point for all the generations in Kikinda.

These were difficult times in Serbia under sanctions.

Few people could afford our desserts, richly filled with high-quality creams.

That is why the workers in our production redesigned, on their own, the machines used until that point, for the dessert manufacturing, in order to produce the biscuits out of raw materials that were available at the time on the domestic market.

The machine that we made by ourselves soon started to work, producing some of our most famous brands today, such as “Domaćica”, “TOTO”, “Noblice”!

“Domaćica” is the first product that was created by the end of 90’s on the machines that we created independently in our factory at the time.

At first, those were crispy biscuits covered with cocoa topping on one, flat side. However, as production, at first, was conducted on the improvised machines, some of the biscuits would turn over on a flat side, along a conveyor belt and some of them on a rough side.

For that reason, all the time during production, 5 workers stood beside a conveyor belt, and once baking was over they turned the biscuits to a correct, flat side, thus preparing them for topping.

“Domaćica” had achieved great market success, the production was modernised, and the process itself was automated.

Besides the first, genuine “Domaćica” that was made in Kikinda, the assortment was expanded with new products – Tart and Flower.

If you lived in Serbia at the beginning of 2000s, you were probably singing “Noblice, Noblice are coming down from the shelf” – a jingle from one of the most famous commercials of that time.

Whether because of the commercial or due to specific design and ingredients, “Noblice” – filled sandwich biscuits, immediately became a true hit!

In our factory at the time, the production process was the following: first, a lower crunchy biscuit surface was baked as well as an upper biscuit with a hole in the middle, and afterwards more than 10 employees manually applied cream to every individual biscuit and covered it with another biscuit.

Today, in an automated production process, in the course of a day, it is possible to make more than 1,400,000 “Noblice” biscuits!

We had lavishly filled two round biscuits with cocoa cream and covered them with cocoa topping. This is how the first “ToTo” chocolate sandwich biscuit was made, which shortly after gained its “ToTo” milk version of a biscuit filled with milk cream.

We are making the first cube wafers – five rows of crunchy waffles filled with creamy filling, made for fun!

In 2006 we also created our first snack product, by using a unique recipe with homemade pastry – the “Trik” salty sticks!

Until today, “Trik” has widened its assortment by offering the filled sticks, pretzels, fishes, but has remained recognisable for its rustic texture that our snacks acquire during the baking process.

In our hometown Kikinda, we have constructed a brand new factory, with total size of two football fields, i.e. 17,000 square meters, following the highest standards of food production and safety.

As we have modernised our production process, we decided to do the same with our identity and production assortment.

“Banini” got the new logotype, and both our new and old products acquired a new packaging design.