Page 40 - bne_Magazine_September_2017

40 I Eastern Europe bne September 2017
Elena Shifrina, CEO of BioFoodLabs, leading a health food revolution in Russia with snack bars.
Former model’s Biofood bars are the new face of Russia’s health food industry
Robert Jordan in Moscow
Model, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alum and now entrepreneur running a health food company, Elena Shifrina is the face of a Russia that could be. Young and ambitious, she abandoned a flourishing modelling career on the runways of Paris and Milan to launch a food processing company that is now exporting from Russia to over a dozen countries.
The idea for the food bars came to her in the dinning room at MIT, where she did a short stint as an exchange student in 2011. Six years later she has already been honoured as one
of Russia’s top young entrepreneurs, and sells her products in Europe, Japan and the Middle East.
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The MIT course was so demanding Shifrina and her classmates had no time to make meals, so many grabbed snack bars from dining areas. Not sugar-filled sweets, though – the kind of nutritious and calorie-lean bars that runners and other athletes consume.
business school, the Skolkovo Graduate Business School in the Moscow area. When an entrepreneurship professor asked her class to come up with a senior project – a product or service they could build a start-up around
– she knew what it would be.
“Russia’s health food industry is growing at 7% a year”
At the time, there were no healthy snack bars in Russia except a limited line
of high-priced imports. Shifrina was thinking about the bars as she returned for her final year at Russia’s preeminent
“The Russian snack bars that
were available then were basically sweets, containing sugar syrups and preservatives, which completely contradicted the idea of a healthy