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| Home > News & events > 2006 feature stories > Best practice yields Kiev’s best pastry | |||||||||
Best practice yields Kiev’s best pastry |
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By Kate Dunn “Mmmmmmmm…” Vena Beleva is savouring the memory of – what, exactly? Her eyelids close slightly as she leans back in her café chair, mentally sorting through her recipe book. There was that Austrian chocolate mousse, that delectable German torte -- and oh, the mouth-watering apple pie in the van Gogh museum in the Netherlands! “You must…” she says, with a vague wave of her hand like a fortune teller trying to discern a sweeter future “…you must try the Valerie pastry shops in London. And in Montreal, the best pastry is at Première Maison.” Satisfied that she has helped a Canadian-born, UK-based visitor to fill in the pastry gaps in her globetrotting life, Ms Beleva sits up smartly and, with a delicate hand, pours a little more mint tea for two. All is gracious in her new flagship Repriza pastry shop and café/restaurant in Kiev, Ukraine. The brass rails gleam. There are no fingerprints on the display glass. Service is flawless, and the cakes and chocolates would put the Ritz, the Pierre and the Kempinski to shame. Small business winner Whether it’s first dates, silver wedding anniversaries, knitting clubs of well-heeled matrons or final handshakes on business deals, it all happens under Repriza’s three roofs in Kiev. So successful is the chain that it has won small business awards from the EBRD, which has supported the pastry chain through small business loans, and from the Kiev Post newspaper. Not bad for a Bulgarian lawyer with a background in the pharmaceuticals industry. Ms Beleva moved to Ukraine from her Sofia home in the late 1990s in order to help a friend with his struggling business. Why did she stay? “I don’t know – maybe it was God’s doing?” she smiles. She became a Kiev representative for multinational drug companies. Her fate was sealed when she rented a shop-front office in central Kiev; city bylaws required that the tenant had to run a small bread shop out of part of it. “So we did that and after a year I started to think I could put the basement beneath the shop to good use by using it as a space for making pastry,” says Ms Beleva. “I consulted with top German and Austrian pastry chefs to learn the craft and the business – whatever I do, I want to do it well. Then our pastry clients asked why didn’t we open a café as well? So we did.” “That she could make the shift from law to pharmaceuticals to pastry shops is not surprising -- Vena would do well at any business she put her hand and mind to,” says Kamen Zahariev, head of the EBRD’s Kiev office and a particular fan of Repriza’s Mozart cake. “We need more entrepreneurs like her who are improving standards for management, product quality and service.” ‘Best practice’ in practice ‘International best practice’ is the standard for top lawyers, accountants, bankers – and one Bulgarian pastry entrepreneur who has successfully tapped into the niche of small luxuries increasingly desired by Kiev residents. Ms Beleva travels several weeks a year to learn the best recipes and best techniques for producing melt-in-the-mouth divinities. Using top-quality ingredients has always been ‘best practice’ among chefs, so in the quiet summer months Repriza staff is put to work preserving local fresh fruit for use throughout the year along with luscious Belgian and German chocolate and fine flour from abroad. “We need best practice in terms of freshness, display, storage. I’ve just returned from the European Exhibition for Pastry, to see the new equipment and other technology,” says Ms Beleva. But there’s one aspect of ‘best practice’ that Ms Beleva seems to have known intuitively: how to treat people, be they staff or customers. She asks a waiter behind the cakes counter to pass her something; he doesn’t hear or notice her and unwittingly turns his back on Ms Beleva to finish a task. The boss waits patiently, one or two minutes, until he is done before politely repeating her request. Ms Beleva wants happy staff. “Three-quarters of our production is by hand, good pastry requires that. So I tell my staff that they should be happy and warm when they make pastry.” Planning expansion Repriza has 220 employees in its cake factory and three shops which Ms Beleva plans to expand to seven; the company sells only its own products (about 100 cakes per day, plus meals) and doesn’t wholesale. “Unfortunately,” sighs Ms Beleva, “people here don’t know about best practice so we teach our staff from scratch. We have special programmes for barmen, waiters, food production. We are preparing for expansion and our next step is to open a training centre.” Ms Beleva is mostly self-taught, with the help of pastry chefs she visits on her annual ‘best practice’ tours of the world’s capitals; she also had input from European consultants. “I learned how people learn and with my human resources manager I created the training programmes, filling in and changing it as we went along.” Improving credit terms While credit availability to small businesses in Ukraine has expanded in recent years, the terms of it do not yet meet their needs. Says Ms Beleva: “Loans from most local banks are expensive and for short terms only, like three years, and they want you to pledge collateral equal to twice the loan’s value, which is quite impossible for many businesses.” Thanks to a small business credit line* supplied by the EBRD to Ukraine’s Forum Bank, she was able to borrow from the latter €1.2 million for five years, with half the collateral required by other banks. “I’m well aware this is due to the EBRD’s influence and credit. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to expand.” * Donors supporting the credit line include Canada, the European Union, Germany and the United States. Kate Dunn is the EBRD’s Senior Writer.
Contact: 20 January 2006 |
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