ELEMENTAREE: "We want to fundamentally change the retail market in Russia, freeing people from the necessity of grocery shopping"

The main service of our company – delivery of sets of products for cooking of 5 meals for proper nutrition – was launched recently, in June of this year. At first the team had only a few people, and we had to outsource specialists for many tasks. By December, we have "grown" up to 30 employees. About half of them are now working in the office and are engaged in marketing, sales, preparation of menus, contacts with customers, and many other things, and the remaining team members are working directly in the production: buy and process food, put it in boxes and deliver to customers.

Today my life is connected with people's health, but once I wanted to become an ambassador. I even got my first education in international economics. But then I learned that in Russia there was only one female ambassador - in Mauritius, and I decided I was not ready to spend my life to change this trend. The second education – MBA Harvard. I chose Harvard University because of the possibility to meet people from different countries with different backgrounds. Besides Harvard is a recognized centre of expertise.

While studying at Harvard University I often had to cook, and very soon I wondered how I could optimize this process. It became clear that searching for recipes, grocery shopping, cleaning and cutting of the products takes too much time. The idea to reduce the complexity and duration of the cooking process to 30 minutes by reassigning the uninteresting actions to someone else once turned into a commercial project.

In future we want to fundamentally change the retail market in Russia, freeing people from the need to do grocery shopping, study the composition of the food products and stand in checkout lines. Our mission – to make people happy! We help our customers to simplify their lives, enabling them to make their schedules more efficient. Why spend precious hours searching for grocery and cooking (or eat junk food) if you need only 30 minutes a day to maintain healthy and tasty diet? The released time can be used for many more pleasant and useful activities.

We did not prepare specially for GenerationS, but tried to make the most of the opportunity which appeared hen we became finalist of the competition. We sent different members of our team to different training and consultations, so that more employees could learn something new and get an interesting experience. It was very difficult for Silard, our colleague who does not speak Russian. We had to "switch" investors into English so that he could take part in a conversation at the investor session. This, unfortunately, did not always work.

During the competition we were close to eating a "losers’ pizza". I could not attend the award ceremony and the distribution of checks, and Silard did not immediately tell me that we had taken second place. I thought that we did not get anything, was upset and ordered a lot of pizza to "celebrate" our failure. During the dinner Silard, after all, told what had happened, and in the end everything turned out to be very funny.

After the competition we started several interesting discussions. I'm sure they will lead us to something good and important. In addition, our social capital has clearly grown. Another important result is the active feedback that we received during the competition and are actively using now. We plan to grow, grow and grow and to expand at least 10 times in 2015. We also will constantly improve the quality of our service, so that the customers certainly come back to us after the end of the first subscription.