Russians visit Idaho to scope out grocery stores

A delegation of 10 grocery executives from Russia seems to have found Idaho to their taste during a three-and-a-half-week stay in the Treasure Valley.

Brought to the U.S. by Citizen Initiatives, a San Francisco-based group engaged in “citizen diplomacy,” the Russians visited Albertson’s Inc., WinCo Foods Inc., Wal-Mart’s Caldwell store and several specialty groceries.

They also visited Capitol Distributing, which supplies Jacksons convenience stores, and heard from a number of business speakers at Albertson College of Idaho, Boise State University and other venues.

Yuri Markin, retail director of Sladkaya Zhizn, a food distributor and retailer based in Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky), said the Russian visitors had been impressed by “the friendliness and frankness” of business people here, who “don’t keep secrets from us Russians.”

Sladkaya Zhizn, founded in 1993, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a $34 million wholesaling company that supplies an astounding number of very small “Mom and Pop” grocery shops – 1,500 – in Russia’s Volga-Vyatskiy region east of Moscow, he said.

The company, whose name means Sweet Life in Russian, employs 700 people and operates a fleet of 50 trucks.

Sales growth, according to Markin, has averaged 100 percent annually over the past five years, and the company is entering the retail sector, having opened three “supermarkets” of 500 to 1,000 square meters each (up to 11,000 square feet.) More are planned.

In a hurried interview in the parking lot of the Boise Consumer Co-op – a specialty organic and gourmet grocery visited by the delegation last week – Markin said he was impressed with the “different types of markets” in the Boise area.

“Each shop has its own target” among consumers, he noted.

Another delegation member, Sergey Kudrov, observed that U.S. companies “are able to provide any consumer with what he likes, to his or her tastes.”

There are so many forms and styles of shops,” said Kudrov, general director of Otpima, a chain of stores based in Izhevsk, in west-central Russia. “Even the supermarkets differ from each other radically.”

Among interests studied by Kudrov during the U.S. visit were personnel management issues, including motivational factors, and employee benefit systems.

He and Markin were the only Russian grocers in the group who spoke some English. An interpreter, Natalia Ivanova, accompanied the delegation, which was housed by host families, mainly in Caldwell. The Caldwell Optimist Club served as host organization for the trip.

The Sept. 27-Oct. 21 visit was a project of the Productivity Enhancement Program, funded by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs and run by the Center for Citizen Initiatives.

Entities involved in the visit included Albertson’s, Farmers & Merchants State Bank, Goff Insurance Agency, Ripley Doorn and Co., the Idaho Small Business Development Center, City Market, Capitol Distributing, Wal-Mart, U.S. Bank, Buy Idaho, Cliff’s Country Market, the Caldwell Chamber of Commerce and WinCo Foods.

According to a statement, the PEP program seeks “to provide crucial management training to Russian small business owners and entrepreneurs in order to boost production of domestic goods and services” in Russia.

“PEP directly targets private business owners in Russia because this sector is vitally important to a healthy market economy,” the statement says.