New wholefood stores in St. Petersburg

Organic has an uphill struggle in Russia. The streets are packed with the big limousines of the nouveaux riches and old cars from the west. The air is heavy with pollution. The amount of information consumers have is low, and nowhere is there any support for creating the structures that promote organic. But, as in all deserts, you find little green shoots of hope. The first wholefood shops and internet shops are starting to build up the necessary infrastructure. Kai Kreuzer, the editor of Organic-Market.Info, visited them on location.

(Picture: Alena Gililova and Anton Gililov, the owners of Girlanda)

“A year ago we opened out first shop, and on average we get 80 people doing their shopping with us every day,” Anton Gililov, the owner of the wholefood shop Girlanda, is pleased to report. It is located in a residential district to the north of the city centre. With five million inhabitants, St. Petersburg is the second biggest city in Russia after Moscow. His wife is responsible for marketing. Alena Gililova used to work in a company with 5,000 employees, where she was the head of the marketing department.
 

Their aim is to increase the number of customers to 100 a day and to raise the average spend from the equivalent of 25 to 40 euros. As a consultant to Russian firms, he earned a small fortune in Germany, Amsterdam and London which he is now investing in St. Petersburg. He says that about half of the allocated sum of three million euros has been invested. In addition to the first wholefood shop (50 m² of retail area) that opened in August 2012, two further shops (75 m² and 30 m²) in residential districts in St Petersburg. Their aim is to achieve sufficient volume of sales to create full loads for the expensive transport that brings goods from up to 200 km away and to keep their own production facility running at full capacity. This is where half and quarter carcasses are delivered, butchered and made ready for sale in small packs. They also produce jams and juices such as sea buckthorn, raspberry and cranberry, and cottage cheese comes from one of the farms.

In bright and friendly surroundings, customers have a choice of 300 articles, of which about 90 % are from the St. Petersburg region and are predominantly fresh foods like bakery goods, milk and other dairy products, meat, fruit and vegetables. Alena Gililova invited the press to the launch of the first shop, and she adds that they were more than happy to travel to the port at the eastern end of the Baltic. Up to that point, there had not been anything comparable in St. Petersburg. “We were really delighted with the response of the media,” says Alena, who is shortly to become a mother for the third time. The opportunity to taste a variety of dairy products and ham quickly convinced the representatives of the press of the outstanding quality of their products.

The Gililovs use cross-marketing to keep the public interested in their shops. At sports events they set up a stand and sell organics, and they are present at kindergartens and schools too, Alena Gililova explains. On these occasions, they always give priority to tasting their products (picture): “We let people try our products, and it’s always been the taste that has convinced them most of all.” The trigger for involving themselves with organics and becoming a player in what had been a completely unknown industry was the birth of their first child, who could not tolerate the residues of antibiotics and other substances in milk. This is why they started looking for alternatives but they were not able to find products that were suitable and also available on a daily basis. Businesses with a similar concept, like Daylesford Organic in London, served as a model for their shop.
 

Maria Girschberg and her business partner Dmitriy Shevelev (picture) run an online delivery service. They launched Greenfarm in mid-September 2010, and they now supply 300 - 400 households each week with bags of fruit and vegetables and cool bags containing dairy and meat products. “We do the packing twice a week, and once a week in the summer holidays,“ Maria explains in fluent English. They use their three delivery vans to fetch products from about 40 producers in a radius of up to 200 km. The goods are stored on shelves and in refrigeration units in a warehouse in the south-west of St. Petersburg. The following morning - on Tuesdays and Fridays - five or six employees organize the packing of the goods before driving with the bags to the customers, who are telephoned half an hour before the arrival of their order. The coolbags are taken away after the goods are handed over. The delivery staff leave the vegetable bags with the customers and collect the payment.

Girschberg estimates that she has about 2,000 customers. She is surprised that some only order at Christmas and Easter, but on the other hand a few order twice a week. She is very pleased with 30 % growth a year. Only one of the 40 producers - a potato farmer near St. Petersburg – is certified organic. “The others farm largely according to organic principles or are in conversion,“ says the managing director. “We inspect our farmers regularly and keep taking samples.“ She explains that the collaboration is based on trust. In addition to private customers, they supply five restaurants that are managed by Italian and French chefs, who know all about organic quality from their home countries.
(Picture: The Church of the Resurrection of Christ – finished in 1907)
 

Greenfarm offers its customers a farm visit four or five times a year. Girschberg knows from experience that “if people visit a farm just once, they stay loyal customers for years and buy products regularly.” She stocks a product range of around 500 articles, and the number of imported items is vanishingly small. The range consists mainly of fresh products from the region: dairy products, eggs, cheese (20 sorts!), fresh goats and cows milk, fruit, vegetables, bakery goods, meat and sausage products, cereals and potatoes. Products from warmer climate zones are sourced from four controlled organic farmers in the Krasnodar region (near the Crimean Peninsular) 3,000 km to the south. They supply cherries, vegetables, clementines and apples. They also buy processed products there like canned maize, peas and tomatoes, and pumpkin juice. (Picture: Organica wholefood shop in St. Petersburg)
 

Another organic shop is called Organica, that developed out of the online shop Supergreen. The online shop has been operating for two and a half years, and the approximately 30 m² store (picture) was opened in January 2013. The owners, Oleg Berdnikov and Natalia Volkova, concentrate on imported controlled organic goods, that constitute about 80 % of their stock. Their limited range of bread and dairy products is sourced locally. They probably sell around 500 articles: juices, chocolate, staple foods, nuts, dried fruit, natural cosmetics by, for example, Weleda and detergents and cleaners by Ecover. The price of many imported goods is, however, a real deterrent and very few people can afford these goods. An example: a 100 g bar of Vivani chocolate costs 260 roubles (6 euros). (Picture: Attractive presentation at Organica)

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