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Chelny-Khleb
A bakery built to feed a truck-making city answered the unpaid bills of the 1990s, by Rafael Yunusov's account, by opening its own shops, then its own mill; an agrofirm was set up to grow its grain. In 2024, with the shops making a loss, Chelny-Khleb sold the chain in two stages and kept the ovens, the mill and the store buildings, now leased to the buyers for ten years.
Fields, ovens and the buildings it lets
Shops built against unpaid bills, sold when they stopped paying
In November 2024 Chelny-Khleb (Челны-Хлеб, “Chelny Bread”) let go of its grocery chain. The trading house that ran the shops passed wholly to Leana Garifullina (Леана Гарифуллина), and the stores became Bayram (Байрам). The Naberezhnye Chelny bakery, run by Rafael Yunusov (Рафаэль Юнусов) since 1993, had opened them, by his account, to escape customers who did not pay. It kept the ovens.
The bread plant of a truck city
The bakery was built for a city of trucks. Bread Plant No. 1 of the Naberezhnye Chelny bread combine opened in 1973, baking up to 80 tonnes a day, according to a history of the plant in Komsomolskaya Pravda, for the city that had grown up around the KAMAZ truck works. It was a state bakery, part of the city’s bread combine.
The company that runs it today, the bakery company Chelny-Khleb, was registered on 17 February 1999, and it still holds the plants and the store property. Bread, laminated goods, sushki, baranki and chak-chak, the Tatar honey pastry, come out of Department 1 in the Sidorovka settlement. Department 2, beside the head office on Khlebny proezd, also makes confectionery under the Tortugaliya (Тортугалия) name, and the bakery runs its own Mudry Pekar (Мудрый пекарь, “Wise Baker”) bakery-cafés in the city.
Yunusov was appointed general director in August 1993 and has held the post ever since. Business Online calls him the bakery’s owner. The company’s story is less about baking than about what it added around its ovens, one layer at a time, and what it later chose to let go.
Bread shipped, money owed
The threat that shaped the company arrived with the market. In the 1990s, Yunusov recalled in a 2017 interview with Business Online, the plant shipped its bread and was paid, to put it mildly, not always. The unpaid bills piled up into what he called artificial debts, and by his account they left the plant unable to function fully or to buy its raw materials.
Flour was the other squeeze. The shortfall reached up to 1,000 tonnes a month, he said in 2017, and the plant bought flour in neighbouring regions to keep baking. It was, in his telling, a decade of hard reforms in which some bread producers survived and others passed into history.
He describes the response as discipline rather than rescue. Through the non-payments, by his account, the plant paid its wages in full and on time, and it did not go looking for state aid; it found the money for its own development. A bakery whose customers would not pay could cut costs only so far, however. The deeper remedy was to stop needing those customers at all.
A counter of its own
That was the decision. The plant would open shops of its own, Yunusov said in 2017, so as once again to escape dependence. In 1999 the bakery’s trading house opened its first Chelny-Khleb store, in the city’s 32nd microdistrict. Bread that left the ovens now reached a till the bakery controlled.
Retail was only the first layer. By his account the bakery went on to build its own mill-elevator and its own boiler houses. Separately, in 2003, an agrofirm was created by a resolution of the Republic of Tatarstan’s Cabinet of Ministers to grow grain for the bakery’s mill: Rodnye Kraya – Tugan Yak (Родные края – Туган як), whose Tatar half means “native land”. In a 2014 interview Yunusov put its land at about 25,000 hectares, across 14 villages around Nizhny Tabyn in the Muslyumovsky district. Grain from those fields went through the bakery’s own mill, into its own ovens and onto its own counters.
The holding that grew around the bakery was, by Yunusov’s account in 2014, running 52 stores and employing more than 5,000 people in 2013, shops included. Each of the bakery’s own layers had been added against a particular weakness: customers who did not pay, flour that ran short, supplies that could not be counted on. None was there for its own sake.
Selling the tills
In time the shops brought a weakness of their own. In 2023 the trading house that ran the Chelny-Khleb grocery chain ended the year with its first loss, Business Online reported. The shops had been opened, by Yunusov’s account, to escape customers who did not pay. By then they were a retail business in their own right, with a retailer’s results.
The bakery’s answer came in stages through 2024. On 1 March management of 59 stores and the Chelny-Logistik (Челны-Логистик) distribution centre passed to Salyut (Салют), the Ufa management company of the Batyr (Батыр) group, the local business site Chelny-biz reported. In May, Business Online reported, 60% of the trading house passed to Garifullina; the bakery company was not part of the sale.
In November Garifullina became sole owner of the trading house, and the stores were rebranded Bayram. Rafael Yunusov’s son Eduard Yunusov (Эдуард Юнусов), who in November 2024 was general director of the Chelny-Khleb management company, gave Business Online the reason: “The business stopped bringing us a certain income.”
What the bakery kept
What stayed mattered as much as what went. The bakery company kept the store premises and the warehouse, Business Online reported in November 2024, and leases them to the buyers for ten years. The shops Chelny-Khleb once ran as a retailer it now holds as a landlord. The Bayram stores trade in buildings it owns, and the former Chelny-Logistik distribution centre remains its property.
The bakery itself stayed where it was, with its ovens, its mill-elevator, its confectionery and its bakery-cafés. On 13 December 2024 it completed a closed share issue to two subscribers, Rafael Yunusov and Farit Shaimardanov (Фарит Шаймарданов), according to the SKRIN corporate-disclosure database. Its share register is kept by an independent registrar and is not public.
Over three decades the company has treated integration as a set of separate defences rather than a single identity. In Yunusov’s telling, the shops came in to escape customers who did not pay, and the mill and the boiler houses to escape shortages. When the shops themselves stopped paying, they went. The bakery kept the parts that make bread, and the buildings it could rent to whoever runs the tills.
Researched 30 sources in Russian.