‘Our company was on the verge of bankruptcy twice due to problems with raw materials’ - Oleg Sirota

During the event, Oleg Sirota gave some advice to novice farmers about the creation and development of cheese factories.

At the first stage, the farmer will obviously need money – his own or an investor's, Oleg Sirota reminded. Moreover, it is quite difficult to calculate the exact amount needed to launch an enterprise. So, the entrepreneur, according to the initial business plan to create his own cheese factory, planned to spend about 6 million rubles. However, as a result, the amount increased to 22 million rubles. With these funds, a factory was built with a capacity of 2 tons of milk per day. ‘And it took me and our team 1.5-2 years to reach 2 tons of processing,’ Oleg Sirota recalls.

The next important point when creating a cheese factory is training in cheese production technologies. Now there are quite a lot of organizations in Russia where this can be taught, the entrepreneur noted.

Another painful problem is raw materials. Today, the price of 1 liter of milk for the production of high-quality cheese is already 44 rubles; the cost of production is growing. Moreover, some small cheese factories have to buy raw materials at 60 rubles per 1 liter.

The difficulty also lies in the fact that milk suitable for cheese production is difficult to find. ‘Milk is a tough issue – we almost went bankrupt a couple of times because there was no milk, or only low-quality milk was available. We could not find it; we could not ensure its supplies. And several times we teetered on the edge,’ said Oleg Sirota.

‘There are problems with milk every year, usually in autumn, when contracts are signed, everyone starts running around the market and looking for milk, and we have problems,’ Oleg Sirota explained.