Mikhail Goncharov Fast Food, Russian Style

Blini, borsch, pelmeni, and kvass are probably not the first items one thinks of when talking about fast food.

Such hearty Russian staples are more associated with home cooking than a bite on the go, but entrepreneur Mikhail Goncharov has found a way to commercialise them.

The chain that he founded, Teremok, is Russia’s answer to the capitalist icon that is McDonald’s. It is ubiquitous across Russia, but is most concentrated in Moscow and St Petersburg, with more than 500 outlets between the two cities alone. In 2016, Teremok made its first foray out of its homeland into America—to New York City, no less.

Goncharov’s career, as described to journalists over the years, is a fast food rags-to-riches story with a distinctly Russian flavour. So how did Goncharov build his empire of blini and borsch? We find out in this issue of SME.

DREAMING OF A BETTER LIFE

Goncharov was raised in Almaty, in the former Kazakh SSR. He got his first taste for entrepreneurship as a mathematics student at Moscow State University, where he became one of many students who washed windows for pocket change. Inspired, he struck out on his own, later telling the Russian magazine Food Service, “I’d be walking down the street and I’d see, say, the Ministry of Railways and Communications, with black, dirty windows…and I’d go inside and ask, ‘Don’t you need someone to wash the windows?’ ”

He wanted most of all to afford expensive, imported goods— luxuries in the former Soviet Union. At the time, he said, Snickers bars were the “symbols of a better life” for university students.