Homey preserved foods company brings its cozy image and familiar tastes into Ukrainian kitchens and pantries
In Slavic folklore veres, a bushy herb studded with delicate pink flowers is thought to be the ultimate cure‑all. Known as heather in English, this wild plant, when dried and brewed as tea, emits a soothing aroma, creating a cozy, homey feeling.
That’s the image a handful of businessmen were seeking when they started up Veres, a preserved foods company, four years ago.
“With this name, we wanted to emphasize our desire to produce preserved food that creates the taste of homemade Ukrainian preserves,” said Andry Rodiontsev, who heads Veres.
Whether it is the cozy image or the familiar taste, Veres has become a popular product in Ukraine’s kitchens and pantries. Veres preserves can be found in almost all major supermarkets and food stores in Ukraine.
Oleksandr Kosar, a manager of Tiko Market, which serves more than 100,000 customers a month, said that Veres’ wide assortment of products attracts shoppers to the store.
People who want to taste something new, such as eggplant in spicy adzhyka, a hot sauce, look to Veres.
“We’ve been collaborating with Veres for 10 months, and I can say that Veres’ large assortment makes it stand out from Chumak, its main competitor,” Kosar said.
One key to Veres’s success is that the company uses folk recipes. These secret concoctions that have been passed down from generation to generation are being made available for mass consumption.
Kabachkova paste, real homemade adzhyka and several types of jarred bean‑pods, pickled cucumbers and tomatoes produced by Veres all derive from the memorized recipes of Ukrainian families.
For the past two years, Veres has held a competition in Ukraine for the best recipes for home preserves. The contest is announced in March on food labels, in newspaper and TV advertisements and on posters at local stores. More prestigious than entering a winning pie at the state fair, this contest draws boxes and boxes of secret recipes from people all over the country.
“There are not only letters there. There are the whole tales and stories about the origin of those recipes – how and when – because some of them are very old and have been passed down from generation to generation,” Rodiontsev said.
On Sept. 1 the company announces the winners, who are rewarded with a cash prize of Hr 2,000.
Veres produces the winning recipes. In fact, half of Veres’ products originate from the competition.
Currently, the only competition for Veres is in the ketchup market, where Chumak and Torchyn Produkt currently dominate the market. But Veres is gaining in the ketchup market, too.
In September, Veres shashlychny ketchup won a gold medal at the World Food 2000 exhibition in Moscow. More than 500 companies from 40 countries entered their products in the contest. Veres also took home medals for canned mushrooms.
Rodiontsev attributes the ketchup success to a new production system implemented five months ago.
Veres was started by a group of friends who got acquainted through another venture – climbing – more than two decades ago. The men decided to work together and started in construction. Later they branched off into selling food products and eventually developed a distribution network.
“First of all, we had to learn how to sell,” the head of Veres’ board of directors, Rodiontsev, said. Four years ago, they decided to start producing. Six months later, they opened their first plant in Kaniv.
They started by buying a Kaniv food plant that had laid off all its workers and closed down a short time before. Veres bought the plant, reopened it and rehired many of the former plant workers. That turned out to be a boon for Veres, which benefited from plant specialists with more than 30 years experience.
The first two varieties of ketchup rolled out of the Veres plant in September 1997. Today production has increased tenfold. The plant, which started with two kinds of ketchup, now rolls out more than 60 different varieties of preserves.
The number of employees has increased, too. The workforce grew from 200 to 700, and during summer, seasonal workers add 300 more to the payroll.
Veres now operates two plants and is building a third one, also in the Kaniv region.
Why Kaniv?
“First of all, we wanted our plant to be located close to Kyiv because it has a very good raw materials base. And Kaniv is one of those classic Ukrainian places, well‑known because famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko is buried there,” Rodiontsev said.
Veres uses only Ukrainian‑grown fruits and vegetables, selected from farms from Crimea to Chernihiv.
“We can grow eggplants, peaches or sweet cherries in our region, too, but the quality of some vegetables from Crimea, like tomatoes, eggplants and sweet pepper, is much better,” Rodiontsev said. Now some farmers in Kaniv are growing crops specifically for Veres. The company has its own mushroom farm.
Today, Veres exports its products to all of the CIS countries, in addition to Germany, Israel, the Czech Republic, Canada and the United States.
Not bad for a young company with no outside investment.
