How Russian restaurateurs work in the USA

Russian chain of fast food restaurants "Teremok" announced closing two of their establishments in New York. Earlier, the founder of the franchise, Mikhail Goncharov, told about the visit of a local medical inspector, who allegedly asked him strange questions.

Photo: Facebook / Teremok USA

One of the largest fast food chains in Russia opened its first restaurant in New York in June 2016, a few months later, the second point opened, writes with the BBC.

At first, the company did well, but March 31 Goncharov wrote on his page on Facebook that he faced “outright hostility” from the city health inspector.

According to Goncharov, the New York inspector, in particular, asked if his company was connected with Russian President Vladimir Putin and whether she was laundering money from Russia.

Goncharov later told reporters about the closure of both restaurants, but did not give detailed comments, saying that he wanted to “avoid unnecessary political speculation.”

After that, the journalists asked three Russian restaurateurs who have establishments in the United States about how difficult it is to conduct business in this country and what problems they most often encounter.

Arkady Novikov, owner of the Novikov Restaurant & Bar in Miami

In the US, our restaurant was difficult to obtain a license and work permit, because for this you need to go through a lot of checks and controls. But if the company has successfully passed all this and if it maintains quality, then there should be no problems.

I don’t really believe that for some political reasons someone will prevent a small company or a small cafe from doing its business.

The more strictly regulated, the easier it is to get permission - you just have to fulfill all the requirements. The main thing is to follow the law, then no one will prohibit you from doing anything. Everything is laid out there down to the smallest detail: for example, if you work from 12:00 to 23:30, then you do not have the right to work until 23:45. If you work longer, you will be reprimanded, then a second reprimand, and the third time you may be closed. If it says that it is forbidden to use glass wine glasses, but only plastic ones, then you need to use plastic ones.

Rules are rules - don't break them and there won't be any problems. Of course, we had checks, but they were all within the law.

Igor Zhuravlev, founder of the Coffeemania chain of coffee shops

Of course, the US market is different from the Russian and European. For example, there you need to be very attentive to the wage fund, because it has a completely different structure than in Russia. You need to be very sensitive to any changes, everything must be considered and carefully considered.

Consumer preferences there are also different - we were even forced to change the name to Address, because New Yorkers associate the name “Coffeemania” with a democratic cafe, but not with a full-fledged restaurant.

Before opening a restaurant, it is necessary to comply with all statutory security measures, which are scored. Before the checks, we invited a consulting company to point out possible shortcomings to us, which we immediately eliminated.

Fedor Ovchinnikov, founder of the Dodo Pizza pizzeria chain

Photo: Facebook / Dodo Pizza Oxford

Our first pizzeria in the USA has been operating for two years now we are opening the third one. We have never felt any pressure due to the fact that we are a Russian company.

In America, the importance of laws is very high, there are strict requirements of sanitary and fire services. There are fewer checks in Russia, so in fact, it’s much easier to open a restaurant here than in the USA.

In the United States, judicial practice is very common: as soon as something happens, you can file a lawsuit. America is a country of lawyers.

Of course, there is a lot of competition in America, but at the same time there is a huge market for pizza - on average, every American household orders pizza twice a week. It is such a mature and competitive market that it does not tolerate mistakes or inefficiencies.

The idea of ​​opening restaurants in the United States arose from the founder Dodo Pizza Fedor Ovchinnikov in September 2013, and he started looking strategic investor. After familiarizing with the market and the problems with choosing the right premises, in March 2016, in Oxford, Mississippi, the first restaurant was launched. Dodo Pizza in the USA.

In order to give people the opportunity to try, it was decided to organize a beta test Dodo Pizza in Oxford: just give away for free one pizza of any recipe from the menu to each of the 500 people who subscribe to the test on the site.

The American team commander, Alena Tikhova, invented to ask each tester to leave a comment on the pizza, honest and frank, and she also promised that the reviews would be published without censorship, even if they were not too biased. They promised to broadcast these reviews directly on the Dodo website.

It was a huge risk. If the testers thought that the pizza had failed, the pizzeria could have been closed - and moved to another city to start from scratch. But if I liked the pizza from Dodo, the testers would buy it themselves, and they would tell the friends, and the pizzeria would gain momentum without any advertising. What would be a new word in the theory and practice of promotion of pizzerias working for delivery.

Dialing 500 testers was easy. To promote the post in Facebook with the proposal to subscribe to free pizza was spent three dollars.

In order to control demand and not to drown in orders, every day Dodo sent out invitations in small batches. They diverged in less than a week. The statistics are as follows: from 500, 80% sent letters were read, 226 people followed the link and ordered pizza, of which 116 people left reviews on the page Dodo Pizza Oxford on Facebook.

From 116 reviews, the pizzeria received only 7 fours, the rest - 109 - fives. Almost every assessment was accompanied by laudatory reviews.

On the first day of work, sales were $ 638. In the second: $ 942. Sales gradually increased, which allowed the restaurateur to open two more establishments in the USA.

The history of the opening in the US pizza chain Dodo Pizza read in the material ForumDaily "How Russian pizzeria chain Dodo Pizza conquered the American market".

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