How the EBRD and EU helped a small Bulgarian business go global

Two university friends once bet that they could build a business together. It took a failed muesli-bar line and an unexpected phone call for them to find out what that business would actually be.

Today, Healthy Bars is a leading private-label manufacturer, supplying high-quality protein and nutrition bars from Sofia, Bulgaria to brands in 49 countries. It’s also building a new factory designed to produce half a billion bars a year, with support from the EBRD and the European Union (EU) having helped the company prepare for this next stage of growth.

Almost shelved

Mavitan Chiftchi and Valentin Strekalovski met as university classmates, bonded by a shared ambition: one day, they would build something together. In 2016, that day arrived: the pair launched a muesli-bar business, hoping to compete with established brands already on Bulgarian shelves.

It didn’t go as planned. Retailer reorders were small, market traction was slow and annual turnover stalled at a modest €50,000.

“Watching stock sit on shelves created a constant, quiet pressure to call it quits,” Valentin recalls. What kept the pair going, he says, was the trust the two had built in one another while at university. Rather than clinging to a model that wasn’t working, they set their pride aside and acknowledged that things needed to change.

That openness led to them entering the company for an international award – not for its muesli bars, but for its packaging. When it won, the recognition put Healthy Bars on the radar of an overseas client, who called with a simple question: could they make protein bars instead?

The call sparked a complete shift in the business, moving it away from its own retail line and into private-label manufacturing. At the time, the company had no protein bar recipe and no dedicated equipment.

“The next 48 hours were a whirlwind,” Valentin says. “It was intense, but it was the exact moment when we recognised the potential and chose to embrace a completely new direction.”

Scaling sustainably

That pivot set Healthy Bars on a path that led to it expanding rapidly and exporting worldwide.

In 2024, as the company prepared for its next leap forward in scale – and sustainability – it turned to the EBRD. Healthy Bars wanted to build its first green production facility as part of a plan to triple its production capacity. The project involved an investment of more than €24 million, combining the company’s own resources with external financing and support from the EBRD and the EU.

The financing, made through a risk-sharing facility with UniCredit Bulbank, has been delivered alongside advisory support under the EBRD’s Green Innovation Programme.

Funded by Horizon 2020, the EU’s research and innovation funding programme, the Green Innovation Programme helps companies based in EBRD investee economies within the EU to pursue greener growth. Its support helped Healthy Bars to map its emissions and resource use and laid the groundwork for a planned rooftop solar installation that is now awaiting financing approval. A €900,000 grant under the programme provided additional backing, helping Healthy Bars adopt greener technologies for protein bar production.

The company’s new production facility, opening in October, will lift capacity to 500 million bars a year – a jump that will change what sustainability means for the business.“

At half a billion units, sustainability stops being a marketing badge or a nice-to-have; it becomes pure operational logic,” Valentin explains. “If you waste even 1 per cent of energy or raw material at our scale, it multiplies exponentially.”

Healthy Bars has also joined the EBRD’s Blue Ribbon programme for ongoing advisory support and is now setting its sights beyond Europe: this November, the company is heading to a major trade show in Chicago as it looks to break into the US market, with expansion into Asia planned for next year.

Looking back on how far the company has come since starting out as a two-person team, Valentin reflects: “You quickly learn humility. Real progress happens when you surround yourself with people who know their craft better than you do. Every single milestone Healthy Bars achieves is a collective effort. We’re simply proud to be building this together.”