Sergey Akulchev

If a business doesn't let you produce a lot and sell far away, you need to close it—at least in a crisis.

Three decades of adding #

Akulchev founded the business in Naberezhnye Chelny in 1995 and has run it ever since. Registries list him as the sole founder of its production company, PK Akulchev, and since November 2023 he has also been that company’s general director. The business makes soft waffles and biscuits, and NTech data cited by Kommersant rank it seventh by value in Russia’s tea-accompaniment confectionery segment in 2024.

The numbers are not what makes his story worth telling. The record of his decisions is. Three times, after the 1998 default, after the lease suits of 2009 and after the fire of 2020, the business reached a point where shrinking would have been the obvious move. Each time the record shows him adding instead: a new product range, a new line, and in 2025 a second factory.

He has been open about the hard years. The mortgaged flat, the money lost at cards and the moments he thought of closing all come from his own accounts, given to regional business papers over more than a decade, or from reports of them.

The first of those moments is the one that set the pattern, and it came early, when the business was a bakery of a few square metres and the money behind it was his family’s.

The bread plant and the bakery #

Akulchev was born in Naberezhnye Chelny, the KAMAZ truck city on the Kama river, and, by his own account, practically grew up at its bread plant, where his mother worked, later as a technologist. His schooling was broken up by moves: he changed schools nine times, living in turn in Veliky Ustyug, Moscow and Chelny.

He trained as a repair fitter at a KAMAZ technical lyceum. He then worked two weeks as a loader and decided, by his own account, that the work was not for him.

His first attempt to make money went badly. By his own account, given to Chelninskie Izvestia in 2014, he once set off for Moscow with money his parents had given him, lost it at cards on the way and told no one.

In 1995 he and his mother opened a bakery of a few square metres in Naberezhnye Chelny. The money came from his parents’ flat, mortgaged to private lenders at 15–20% a month. His mother brought a bread technologist’s training to the venture and set its quality standard. He brought the willingness to borrow at a rate that left no room for a slow year. Looking back in 2012, he described the start to Business Online as, to some extent, a gamble.

It was a bread business at first, and a small one. What it had was a family that had staked its home on it and a founder who had already learned what losing money felt like.

The year he thought of closing #

Three years in, the business met the August 1998 default. The collapse of the rouble that summer made debts that were already heavy much heavier. Business Online, writing in November 2009 and drawing on his earlier remarks to journalists, quoted him: “There were so many debts that there were moments when I thought: I’ll pay it all back and close.” The line reaches us secondhand, through that report; the interview in which he first said it has not been found.

The thought was a reasonable one. The bakery had not yet found the product it would be known for, and closing would have stopped the debt from growing.

He chose the opposite. Business Online’s account has him widening both the range and the territory, to pay the debts down faster rather than wind the business up. In 2001 the bakery added Kurabye (курабье) biscuits, five ovens with depositing machines and a condensed-milk shop. Business Online’s 2009 account places the move a year earlier, in 2000; either way, it widened the business at the point when the debt argued for narrowing it.

In 2002 he went further. At a Moscow food fair he met the Austrian equipment maker HAAS and negotiated a €600,000 soft-waffle line, with 20% of the price paid upfront. Business Online’s 2009 account credits that meeting to luck: it was what set him apart from the many small producers then stamping out standard biscuits. Four years after he had weighed closing, he was committing the business to a machine built for a product no one in Russia was yet making, by the company’s later account, and to paying off the rest of its price.

The bet looks obvious only in hindsight. In 2002 it meant more borrowing on top of the debts that had nearly ended the business, for a product that did not yet exist in the shops.

Waffles nobody wanted #

The line, an SOW 48, started production in 2003; the company says it made Russia’s first soft-waffle product. In 2004 it launched Vienna waffles with a soufflé filling based on the Ptichye moloko (Птичье молоко, “bird’s milk”) cake.

By his own later account, at first nobody wanted to take them. He kept making them. The Vienna waffles became the brand’s signature line, the product the business is still known by two decades later. In 2005 two more lines followed, Crembly and Crisps, and with them the first sales outside Russia: Kazakhstan, Belarus and Azerbaijan, between 2005 and 2006. The waffles that had once been hard to place were now crossing borders.

The second step followed in 2008, when a larger soft-waffle line, an SOW 100, joined the first. In 2010 the company’s goods reached Mongolia. Each addition followed the logic of 2002: put money into equipment, then find the buyers for what it made.

He was also studying. In 2004, the year the Vienna waffles reached the shops, he graduated from Kazan State University, a degree finished while the business was already running.

How he runs it #

Akulchev has kept the business a maker rather than a trader. He has said the company has never been a distributor: it makes the product, and the group’s trading house, TD Akulchev, a separate legal entity, sells it to retail chains and export buyers. The factory is where his attention has gone. By 2023, he told Business Online that year, it made about 150 products on 10 lines, with about half the work automated and a target of 80%.

Product decisions have often been his to announce. The Myafli line, small round soft waffles, followed in 2013. In September 2016, at a regional business forum, he announced that the company would drop palm oil from its recipes in favour of high-oleic sunflower oil, and said prices would rise by about 10% as a result; the company says it was the first in Russia to make the change. In 2015 it took ISO 22000 certification and made its first shipments to the US, China and Armenia, and in 2019 its dry macarons went on sale on Amazon in the US under a retailer’s private label.

The export side has kept widening on the same pattern. His production company, PK Akulchev, was certified by DUM RT’s halal committee (2024), the halal standard body of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Tatarstan, and the Akulchev business exhibited at Gulfood in Dubai in 2025 and 2026.

Lease suits, a café chain and a fire #

The widening did not always go smoothly. In November 2009 the lessor Glavleasing (Главлизинг) filed four suits against his business over about ₽17m in lease arrears, and the business was reorganised into three companies. Two years later he registered the production company, PK Akulchev, in Yelabuga, and in the same year opened a premium café chain of his own, Dessert Boutique, with cafés in Naberezhnye Chelny, Kazan and Moscow.

The café chain was the one widening he reversed. In 2014, with raw-material costs up about 30% and the rouble falling, he closed it; exports to Uzbekistan began the same year.

The heaviest test came on 22 May 2020. A fire at his plant in Naberezhnye Chelny destroyed five of its seven automated lines, during a Covid outbreak. Six days later he told the city’s mayor, as Tatar-inform reported, that restoring the damaged equipment would take a year and a half. Rebuilding production took about 18 months. In the meantime a new jam-waffle line started in the surviving premises within weeks, some work moved to manual labour, and the company put its sales effort behind macarons and filled waffles. Its first television campaign ran in 2021, and in 2022 it set up a contract-manufacturing division.

He did not shrink the business to fit what was left. In 2023, with labour short and retail-chain markups rising, second-hand European lines bought from struggling companies lifted capacity by 20%, and he spoke openly to Business Online about how hard the year had been on margins. In November that year he became general director of PK Akulchev, the company he had founded.

Buying what already stands #

In November 2025 his company took control of the Kolos confectionery factory in Chelyabinsk, thirty years after the bakery opened. He has said he first came to Kolos as a consultant before taking over its management. Chelyabinsk, he told 74.ru, is a city of more than a million people with an airport.

By Business Online’s account, the plant in Naberezhnye Chelny was already running at full capacity, and building a new one would have been slower and riskier. In February 2026 he set out his reasoning to 74.ru. With the key rate near 20% a year, he said, a company should not build new capacity; it should buy something ready-made. The company has announced plans to invest about ₽1bn in Kolos over 2026–27. He has said the group is supporting the factory for now and that he is aiming for it to break even in 2026, and that new products will be made there under the Akulchev name, because retail chains had turned away its older regional brands. The Ruslada brand, which stayed outside the deal, remains with an independent distributor. Asked whether more purchases might follow, he said such strategies exist. Kolos is the first acquisition on record; its earlier growth came through equipment, including the second-hand European lines of 2023. Whether the factory comes back to full use is not yet known.

The decision is recognisably his. In 1998 the debt argued for closing, and he bought equipment. In 2025, with the key rate near 20%, he added capacity again, and this time bought it already standing rather than built it. Thirty years on, at the head of two factories, he is still the one deciding what the business takes on next.

Last updated: October 21, 2026

Researched 55 sources in Russian.