"But what are we going to eat?" - a few months ago, Alexander Lukashenko exclaimed after watching television reports about how German strawberries and Italian olives rot without the hands of Romanian migrant workers during the period of universal quarantine. Several well-known Belarusian businessmen asked a similar question, primarily due to the rapid growth in demand for food and prices for it, during the 2010s. Which of them in the last decade decided to combine their former business with raising cows and potatoes and processing milk and meat - in this material of Office Life and Business Review.
Healthy Baiko Empire
"Namba one" in this list of very worthy names - the founders of the hosiery business "Conte Spa" brothers Valentin and Dmitry Baiko and their junior partner Richard Sherel.
The current senator Valentin Baiko is considered the ideological inspirer of the development of the new direction. In the mid-2010s, an enthusiastic follower of a healthy lifestyle, first for himself and then for everyone, began to grow "organic" berries and fruits on the lands of his own farms "Zdorovy Mir" and "Zdorovaya Strana" in Grodno and Berestovitsky districts. Now they are one of the largest producers of organic products in the country.
The next step was the investment of the owners of Conte Spa in the milk. In 2016, they bought out a controlling stake in the Turov Dairy Plant, one of the largest soft cheese producers in Belarus. Together with the production and distribution network of Baiko, several agricultural enterprises were acquired. On their basis, under the management of the Molochnaya Pravda company, one of the country's largest holdings for the production of raw milk has been formed. Today it includes 10 farms located in the Gomel, Vitebsk and Minsk regions. Their total land fund exceeds 100 thousand hectares. And it continues to grow due to the transfer of new enterprises to the management of Molochnaya Pravda.
In the late 2010s, the Baiko brothers' food business expanded with several more assets. First, they became the owners of stakes and shares in milk processing plants in Shchuchin (Primemilk) and Volkovysk (Bellakt). Secondly, they entered the capital of the third largest mushroom producer in the country - the Shchuchin company Logal-Bio.
"Oil" money for meat
Aleksey Oleksin, the most influential businessman of Belarus, owner of the oil trading company Energo Oil, MTBank and Tabakerok, has concentrated his efforts on the development of the food sector in Belarus on meat.
In 2014, as a result of the division of the assets of Triple with Yuri Chizh, he got the Triple-Veles meat processing plant in Molodechno. He renamed it Veles-Meat, and then, to develop the raw material base, concluded with the state one of the largest privatization deals in the agricultural sector. In 2015, the owner of Veles-Mita bought a share of the Gorodilovo agricultural enterprise in Molodechno district for almost $ 23 million. At the same time, Alexey Oleksin undertook to build on his lands two pig-breeding complexes with a capacity of 100 thousand heads each. The first of them (Sovlovo) was launched in 2017, the second (Polochany) - in the past. Veles-Meat is actively developing export and sees the Chinese market as one of the most important directions, in which the distribution company Chongqing Veles-Meat has been registered since 2017. She sells frozen beef.
Aleksey Oleksin's family - his wife Irina and son Dmitry - owns the Latgales Alus D brewery in Daugavpils.
Milk neophyte Smetanin
Vasily Smetanin, a key shareholder of the Moscow First Avtokombinat im. G. L. Krause and the main owner of several transport and logistics holdings with parks in Belarus and Russia, invested in dairy farms. But he did it not here, but on the territory of Russia, where the Belarusian businessman known by the once thundering brand “Jenty” has been permanently residing since the beginning of the 2000s.
About five years ago, he united several farms bought out in the Moscow region (on the territory of the Klinsky district) into the "Agrofirm" Elgozinskoye ". She specializes in cattle raising and milk production. In 2017, AF Yelgozinskoye became the first in terms of milk yield in the region and is now trying to take leadership positions in the region. This year, it was planned, in particular, to complete the construction of a new dairy farm for 800 heads.
Baranovsky's snack attachment
In 2018, a large retailer and developer, co-owner of the Hippo and Belmarket chains, Oleg Baranovsky, invested in deep processing of potatoes. He became the owner of the leader of the Belarusian snack market - the Onega company.
Having agreed with a pool of creditor banks, the businessman received this asset from the Estonian shareholder of Silvano Fashion Group and Milavitsa, Thomas Tool. In 2019, Oleg Baranovsky completed the construction of the third Onega plant, which specializes in the production of chips from raw potatoes. Up to 70% of its products were planned to be exported.
Flakes for "Doshirak"
An even larger project related to potato processing has been implemented in Russia since 2018 by Vitaly Sobol, co-owner of Agrocenter Sula and Sula Plus, and IT investor Sergey Gvardeytsev.
In 2018, they bought the Maxim Gorky Plus potato flakes plant from Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev (owner of the National Reserve Corporation, National Land Company, British media, real estate in Russia, France, Switzerland and Italy and other assets) in the Tula region. Production capacity, launched in 2011 on the basis of the former collective farm named after Maxim Gorky, are designed for the annual processing of 120 thousand potatoes. It produces both its own products (instant puree "Puree"), and raw materials for manufacturers of confectionery and meat products, chips, snacks, instant meals. In particular, Unilever Rus, Nestle Russia, TPK Biofood, Doshirak Koya, Russkart and others are among the regular partners - buyers of Maxim Gorky Plus products. Flakes are supplied not only to Russian factories - up to 40% of all products are exported.
As part of the deal, Belarusian investors also became the owners of more than 15 thousand hectares of land in the Tula and Bryansk regions, which serve as a raw material base. In the Bryansk region, the land fund is managed by the Klimovskaya Potato Company.
In 2019, the management of the Maxim Gorky Plus plant initiated negotiations on the construction of another potato processing plant in the Novozybkovsky district of the Bryansk region. Its capacity can be 120 thousand tons of potatoes per year.