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Bahetle
In February 2015 Bahetle's annual debt service doubled, from ₽400m to ₽800m, and the Kazan chain announced about 600 job cuts. It did not save itself on the shop floor. It leaned on the kitchens it had run since 2004, and a family-owned factory opened at Zelenodolsk in 2023. What is left makes 12,500 tonnes of food a year.
Own stores and family factories, all in Tatarstan
How a doubled debt bill turned a Kazan chain into a kitchen
On 30 April 2026 Bahetle (Бахетле) closed its last store in Moscow. Its shop front has been shrinking for a decade. Its kitchens have kept working, and in 2023 a family factory joined them. The Kazan company that Muslima Latypova founded on a single supermarket is now a producer of Tatar ready food, and still runs some of its own shops to sell it.
A producer that kept its shops
Bahetle (in Tatar, Бәхетле) is a founder-owned food company in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan. Latypova owns all of its operating company, OOO Bahetle-1, according to registry data, and has been that company’s general director since 2007. It makes 12,500 tonnes of ready food a year in its own kitchens and the family’s Zelenodolsk factory, and sells part of it through its own supermarkets in Kazan and Nizhnekamsk and its social canteens. About 3,500 people work for Bahetle, by Latypova’s count in May 2026.
What makes Bahetle worth a closer look is the direction it has taken since its best year. That was 2016, the height of its retail years, when its revenue peaked, according to KazanFirst. Since then the chain has given up stores, left Moscow and put its weight behind production: its own kitchens, and a family-owned factory at Zelenodolsk, west of Kazan. It has become a kitchen with shops attached, rather than a retailer that happens to cook.
That shift was not improvised in a single crisis year. The company had been making much of the food it sold for two decades. When the money ran short, production was the part of the business it chose to keep, and the shops became one outlet for it among several.
A kitchen behind the counter
The business is older than the name over the door. Kommersant dates the trade-and-production enterprise that became Bahetle to 1991, when Latypova, until then a manager in Kazan’s state catering system, opened a cooperative café and ran a shuttle trade by rail from Tynda with her partner, Rinat Mukhametshin. The first venture was a café, so the business began by cooking before it sold anyone else’s goods. Nothing in that trade was learned from a manual. “Everything we learned by touch, inventing something new on the go every day. When people ask me who my teachers were, I answer: ‘They were the difficulties I had to overcome,’” she told Business Online on 26 February 2020.
The first Bahetle supermarket opened on Sibirsky Trakt in Kazan in December 1998, months after the rouble collapse. A flagship and head office on Pavlyukhina Street followed in 2000. A second store opened in Nizhnekamsk in 2002, and a third, on Zorge Street in Kazan, in 2003, the year Mukhametshin became a co-founder.
The step that shaped everything after it came in 2004. Bahetle opened frozen-food workshops with their own rail siding and set up Bahetle Agro to farm former state land in the Nizhnekamsk district. From then on much of the Tatar food on the chain’s counters, its pelmeni among them, came from its own workshops. Latypova says the dishes are made by hand, with no automated lines. A supermarket that farms, freezes and ships its own food by rail is a manufacturer with a retail front.
The stores multiplied around that kitchen. A store on Yamasheva prospekt in Kazan opened in 2004, one on Ershova Street and one in Naberezhnye Chelny in 2005, and one on Orenburgsky Trakt in 2009. Each new shop was another counter for the same production.
Moscow, the Universiade and a halal store
The chain then reached beyond Tatarstan. In 2006 Bahetle entered Moscow, with a store at Tverskaya 22, in the Summit business centre. It planned from the start to build a business there that it could later sell. The same year it opened social canteens, a catering line that sat alongside the stores and gave the kitchens a second set of customers. Franchise stores followed far to the east, in Siberia: Gastromarket, a partner company, opened Bahetle stores in Novosibirsk in 2010 and in Barnaul in 2012. The franchise carried the name and the format to Siberian cities without Bahetle owning the shops.
The kitchen was tested at scale in 2013, when Bahetle catered for the Summer Universiade in Kazan, the student games the city hosted that year. It was work for a kitchen, not for a shop: food made in volume, to order, for people who would never walk down a supermarket aisle.
On 15 January 2014 it opened Bahetle-Halal, a supermarket at Tukaya 64 in Kazan’s Old Tatar Quarter, certified by the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Tatarstan (DUM RT). The certificate came from the republic’s Muslim spiritual body, not from the company’s own label, and the store stood in the city’s historic Tatar district. A store on Chistopolskaya Street in Kazan followed in 2015. By then the company ran stores in Kazan, Nizhnekamsk, Naberezhnye Chelny and Moscow, franchise stores in Siberia, canteens, workshops and a farm, and its kitchens supplied all of it.
The bill doubles
The trouble arrived through the balance sheet. In February 2015 Bahetle’s annual debt service doubled, from ₽400m to ₽800m. For the company it meant ₽400m more a year in debt service, before any store had paid its rent or its staff. The chain announced cuts of about 600 jobs, a tenth of its staff, which then numbered around 6,000.
The stores did not empty at once. Revenue peaked in 2016, KazanFirst reported. In October 2017 the whole network was offered for sale. Vedomosti reported a valuation of ₽10bn: ₽9.35bn for the Tatarstan stores and ₽650m for Moscow. Latypova said publicly that she meant to sell only the Moscow business and keep the stores at home. The sale did not complete as offered, and the Moscow business was in the end closed rather than sold.
In July 2018 the founding managers were replaced, and a new executive team took over the day-to-day running of the chain. Latypova says that Rustam Minnikhanov, the president of Tatarstan, told her Bahetle had to be preserved as a national brand.
What the company preserved was its production. The workshops opened in 2004 had given it something a pure retailer does not own: a supply of food made to its own recipes, which could be sold through its shops or its canteens. A retailer under the same pressure would have had only its leases to sell. Bahetle could close a store and keep the kitchen that had stocked it.
The closures came in stages. Bahetle-Halal on Tukaya Street and the store on Yamasheva prospekt in Kazan closed in 2023. The Naberezhnye Chelny store closed in 2025, and the first store, on Sibirsky Trakt, has also closed. Each closure took a shop out of the estate without taking a recipe out of the kitchen.
From shop floor to factory
The production side grew while the shop front shrank, and it moved onto a larger site. In May 2020 Latypova’s daughter, Elvira Kharlamova, registered Fabrika Bahetle in Zelenodolsk, west of Kazan, as its sole owner. The first phase of the Zelenodolsk factory opened on 21 November 2023, with a capacity of 30 tonnes a day; more than ₽600m was invested in that first phase, a sum the sources do not tie to either family company. Its capacity was added to the kitchens that had supplied the stores since 2004, not substituted for them. In December 2023 her grandson, Erik Kharlamov, founded a second company, Fabrika Bahetle-1. Both factories belong to family companies, not to Bahetle itself.
That arrangement is what the attribute “vertically integrated” means in Bahetle’s case. The company makes 12,500 tonnes of ready food a year across its kitchens and the family’s Zelenodolsk factory. Its own supermarkets in Kazan and Nizhnekamsk remain one outlet for that food, beside the social canteens it has run since 2006 and the franchise stores in Siberia. The flagship and head office are still on Pavlyukhina Street, where the company has been since 2000, and the stores on Ershova Street, Chistopolskaya Street and Orenburgsky Trakt remain on the company’s list.
The last piece of the retail estate built for sale went in 2026. The Moscow store at Tverskaya 22, opened in 2006, closed on 30 April, as its lease ended. The Moscow plan had run for two decades: a business opened in 2006 to be built and sold, offered with the rest of the network in 2017 at ₽650m, and closed in 2026 when its last lease ran out. Bahetle never sold it. It kept the kitchens that had supplied it.
Who owns and runs it
Today the operating company has a single owner. Mukhametshin was Latypova’s partner in the 1991 trade and, from 2003, a co-founder. Official biographies date Latypova’s role as general director of OOO Bekhetle (Бэхетле) from 1994. She has been general director of OOO Bahetle-1, the operating company, since 2007, and registry data list her as its sole founder, with 100%. The factories at Zelenodolsk sit outside that company, in her family’s hands: Fabrika Bahetle is her daughter’s, and Fabrika Bahetle-1, the company behind the Saelra project, is her grandson’s.
The recognition, too, has been personal rather than corporate. Latypova was named an Honoured Trade Worker of the Russian Federation in 2007, received the Order of Friendship in 2012 and the Order of Honour in 2022, and was made an Honorary Citizen of Kazan in 2022. The honours are hers; the brand they attach to is the one she built and still runs.
What lasted
Latypova has described the closures in personal terms. “There was no time to cry; we understood the company had to be pulled out, it must not die… Every closed store is endless heartache for me,” she told Business Online on 6 May 2026.
Her company today is smaller than at its peak, in revenue and in staff: about 3,500 people in May 2026 against the roughly 5,000 a Forbes profile once gave, and more than a third fewer than the around 6,000 of 2015. The shop front went store by store: Tukaya Street and Yamasheva prospekt in 2023, Naberezhnye Chelny in 2025, Moscow on 30 April 2026. What it kept is its production: the kitchens that have supplied the shops since 2004 still do, and the Zelenodolsk factory has added 30 tonnes a day since November 2023. Roughly half of those 3,500, by Latypova’s account, are cooks, and the shops that remain are one outlet for what the kitchens make.
The ownership is simple, too. Latypova owns all of OOO Bahetle-1, according to registry data, and she still runs it. When the debt service doubled, the retail chain could not carry it. The kitchen behind it could, and the kitchen is the business that is left.
Researched 27 sources in Russian.