Leonid Baryshev

Now I'm interested in making production number one. If we set this goal, we must be ready to walk around without trousers. We won't buy cars; we'll invest in production until we're at the top.

A plan only one partner backed #

Baryshev has been general director of Essen Production AG (Эссен Продакшн АГ) since September 2001, and the mayonnaise the company is known for does not carry his name. It carries the name of his partner, Vadim Makheev (Вадим Махеев): the brand is Makheev (Махеевъ).

That fact is a good place to begin, because it says something about the man who runs the company. Baryshev did not set out to build a brand after himself. By his own account he set out, in 1998, to make mayonnaise, with a business plan that nobody believed in except Makheev and with no money to spare. He bought a used production line and put it in a rented former canteen in Elabuga, and production began on 21 August 1998, the day Baryshev recalls as the day the crisis hit.

This profile follows him through that launch and the choices that came after it. It is not a story of a lucky break. It is a story about what a man does with very little when the ground moves: Baryshev put it all into equipment, went on putting it into production for years, and let his partner’s name go on the jar. The account rests on an interview he gave to Agroinvestor (Агроинвестор) in 2019, a masterclass reported by BUSINESS Online in 2013, and the company’s dated history.

Two students and a Moscow plant #

The partnership is older than the business. In 1996, as students, Baryshev and Makheev traded mayonnaise that they bought from a plant in Moscow. The record says no more about those years, and it is enough to place the pair: young men who knew the product, who knew what it cost at the plant and what it fetched elsewhere, and who stood between the two without making anything.

The trader’s position has a ceiling. His margin comes from someone else’s factory, and the factory sets the terms. A trader who wants to change that has one move available, which is to become the factory. Two years after the students’ trade, the two of them made that move.

The record does not say how the decision was reached, and this profile does not guess. It shows only what was done: a line bought, premises rented, a product they already knew now made by their own hands. What it also shows is how little stood behind the move. They did not inherit a plant or buy into an established firm. They started from a trade in other people’s mayonnaise, and from a partnership between two partners who had, by one of their own accounts, no more than a plan.

Cleaned out #

The year the pair turned to production was also the year Baryshev lost money in a deal of his own. According to BUSINESS Online, the only outlet to report the episode, bandits cheated him in an earlier deal and left him with 200 crates of empty beer bottles. The detail is the kind that is hard to invent and easy to retell, and it is told here only as that outlet tells it.

What it adds to the picture is not the loss itself but the sequence. A man who has been cleaned out in one deal goes on, in the same year, to write a plan for a factory. He did not wait to recover. Whether that was courage or the plain absence of anything else to do, the record does not say, and the difference may be smaller than it looks.

The plan met no welcome. “Nobody believed in the business plan; the only one who supported it was Vadim Makheev,” he told Agroinvestor in 2019. The sentence is plain, and it assigns credit precisely. He does not describe a visionary pitch or a room won over. He says that one person supported it, and he names him.

Fifteen roubles as the crisis broke #

What he did next is set out in the same interview, again without ornament. “We rented premises and bought the first small production line. On the day the crisis hit, 21 August, I had about fifteen roubles in my pocket — we had put everything into equipment.”

Set the two halves of that second sentence against each other. A founder with about fifteen roubles has no reserve: no cash for a bad month, no margin for a late payment, nothing to fall back on if the line breaks or the crisis lasts. The same founder has spent every other rouble on equipment, which is the one purchase that cannot be undone cheaply and the one that produces the thing he means to sell. As the crisis broke he was exposed in the way only a person who has committed completely can be. He had not hedged, and the line was already in the room.

The timing makes the exposure sharper. A currency crisis is the moment when plans made in the old prices stop working, and when the cautious reading of events is to wait. A new business with no cash and an untested product has the strongest case of anyone for waiting. The account Baryshev gives contains no sign that he considered it. The money was gone into the machine before the day arrived, and the only decision left to him was whether to switch the machine on.

He launched anyway. The used line in the rented canteen began to produce mayonnaise in the middle of the default, and what the money had bought was now working. He gives no account of a fallback, and the account he does give is of a man who had already spent the fallback on the line.

That is the turn in the story, and it is a quiet one. Nothing in the record describes a rescue, a lucky order or a rival’s failure. There is a used line, a rented room, a partner who had backed the plan, and a founder with about fifteen roubles. Everything that follows in this profile grows from that arrangement.

A name written big #

The business needed a name for its jars, and the name it ended up with was not Baryshev’s. In 1999 a trademark application was filed for Makheev. He explained why in the same Agroinvestor interview. “When we started this business I didn’t have a local residence registration, and the private enterprise ‘Makheev’ was registered to Vadim Makheev.”

Baryshev had no local registration, so the firm was registered to his partner and took his name. The firm’s name went on the jars, and the name on the jars became the brand. “So it was born intuitively, like many trademarks in the 1990s,” he said.

Founders usually tell the story of a brand as a decision. Baryshev tells it as a by-product, and gives the credit for the name, in effect, to his partner’s paperwork. There is no regret in the telling and no claim to ownership of the idea. The name on the shelf is not his.

Not buying cars #

If the launch showed what Baryshev would risk, the years after it showed what he would not spend. At a masterclass at the IT-park in Naberezhnye Chelny, reported by BUSINESS Online on 7 December 2013, he recalled a decision from about 2000. “Now I’m interested in making production number one. If we set this goal, we must be ready to walk around without trousers. We won’t buy cars; we’ll invest in production until we’re at the top.”

A car is the visible sign that a small business has worked. He names it as the thing he will not buy, and the phrase “without trousers” makes clear how far the refusal was meant to go. It comes from about two years after the launch, and it extends the choice of 1998. The masterclass came years later, so the sentence is a recollection as much as a statement of principle: this is what he says he decided, told from a distance of more than a decade. In 1998 he had little to spend and put it into a line. By 2000, on his own telling, the same choice had become a goal with a name: production, number one.

Two companies, one director #

In September 2001 the partners merged their two sole-proprietor firms into a single joint-stock company, Essen Production AG, and Baryshev became its general director. He has held the post since.

The arrangement settled who did what. In May 2003 the first Essen hypermarkets opened under Optovik (Оптовик), a retail company led by Makheev, while Baryshev ran the production company. It also matches the pattern of the earlier years, in which the person who ran production was the person who had put everything into the line.

The merger itself is worth a sentence. Before it, there were two small firms, each registered to one partner, and the brand on the jars had grown from the name of one of them. After it, there was one company, and a general director whose own name appears nowhere on the product. The arrangement asks a founder to be content with being the person who makes the thing, not the person whose name is on it.

Under his direction the production company kept extending what it made and where. In 2010 it opened a sauce plant in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, and added jams to the range. In 2012 it opened the ESSEN confectionery factory in Naberezhnye Chelny, its move into sweets.

In 2009 he and Makheev were elected deputies of the State Council of Tatarstan, the republic’s legislature.

What the choices add up to #

Taken together, the record makes a pattern rather than a legend. At the start, Baryshev has been cleaned out in one deal, has a plan that one partner backs and has about fifteen roubles as the crisis breaks. He puts what he has into a machine. Two years on, by his own telling, he refuses the cars. In 2001 he takes the production company, and when the shops open in 2003 he leaves them to his partner. At each point the choice is the same: the money, and the director’s attention, stays with the factory.

The lesson is narrower than the usual story about founder grit. A founder with no cash cannot buy resilience. He can make one large, hard-to-reverse bet on the thing he means to sell, and then refrain from spending it on anything else. That is a discipline of restraint, and it is easier to describe than to keep.

Since September 2001 he has been general director of the company that a used line in a rented canteen became.

Last updated: October 24, 2026

Researched 44 sources in Russian.