Sultan Safin

I have no connections. I'm an ordinary village guy from the Samara region.

A geologist from Kamyshla #

Safin comes from Kamyshla, a Tatar village in the Samara region, outside Tatarstan itself. The republic reached him first as a summer: in 2005 he spent one at the Idel camp in Bolgar, his first contact with Tatarstan. Two years later he enrolled at the Institute of Geology of Kazan Federal University, where he studied until 2012.

What he had by the end of his studies was a subject and an idea. On an internship in China in 2010, the idea of a Tatar halal fast-food business came to him.

In 2011 he and Ainur Kamaliev, who would become one of his co-founders, settled on a name for it: Tubetey. Nothing yet existed to carry the name. It would be four years before the first pavilion opened.

Five interviews #

Geology took Safin further from home before it brought him back. He took a master’s degree in Saudi Arabia and then joined Saudi Aramco as a reservoir engineer on the Ghawar field. It was not an easy door to open. The company does not usually hire without solid work experience, he told RBC in 2017, but he had been lucky: “after five interviews my candidacy was approved.”

The post was the kind of career a geology graduate trains for. It was secure, it was abroad, and it had nothing to do with pastry. Safin kept the food idea alongside it. In 2014 he wrote the full concept and strategy for the business as a single book, a plan on paper drawn up while he was still working in the oil industry.

The choice of 2015 #

The plan became a business in Kazan in the summer of 2015. The first Tubetey pavilion opened on 14 June beside the suburban ticket office at Kazan-1 station. In July, with six pavilions trading at the world aquatics championships, Safin left Saudi Aramco to commit to the business he had co-founded with Kamaliev and Ruslan Gilmutdinov.

It was a choice between a career that had already proved itself and a venture that had proved one summer’s demand. The order of events matters. He committed before the business had shown it could last, not after, and he left a job that had taken five interviews to win.

It did not last, at first. In August the city froze the arena pavilions, and the company went into several loss-making years. Safin does not soften that period. “You don’t have to be a businessman to see that everything was running at a loss,” he told Business Online in December 2025. “For several years we survived practically without money, on bare enthusiasm.”

In 2016, as the company began franchising, he spent an internship in Denver, in the United States. That year also brought a franchise decision he later called a mistake. A free franchise he had allowed his franchise partner, Azat Nazmutdinov, was revoked late in 2016, and Nazmutdinov went on to build Kystybyi, his own venture. Of granting it, Safin told Business Online in 2017: “I let him, and that was a mistake.”

Closing most of it #

The larger test of the franchise model came three years later. By November 2018 Tubetey had 17 points of its own formats, franchises included, and 82 shops in 20 cities stocked its frozen goods. By June 2019 Safin had closed most of the network built over four years, keeping the company’s own two restaurants and two pavilions. The franchise outlets in Moscow and Samara closed that year; only two franchise points, in Surgut and Ulyanovsk, were kept. “We cleaned out the team hard, because values and the people around us are what matter most,” he told Business Online that month, as reported by Buybrand.

It was a founder taking apart much of what he had built, and saying so in public. The company that came out of it was smaller. When COVID reached Kazan in 2020, the team under him reassigned about 30 roles in two weeks.

By then he had a formal title to go with the role. He has been general director of Tubetey’s management company since 2018, and by 2025 he described his work as leading strategy, product and brand.

A different kind of partner #

After the 2019 cut, the question was how to grow again without repeating what had just failed. Franchising had let other people open outlets under the Tubetey name, from a cafeteria on Derbenevskaya embankment in Moscow to a franchise in Naberezhnye Chelny, withdrawn in February 2019 after quality failures. The answer he and his co-founders reached was to bring in investor partners as co-owners of restaurants supplied from the company’s own kitchen.

A franchisee buys the right to use a name; an investor partner co-owns the restaurant itself. The restaurants that followed opened in Kazan, on Universitetskaya Street in 2019 and Tatarstan Street in 2021, and in 2023 the model went beyond the city, with Zaman, a ₽100M restaurant project in Ufa. The same year Tubetey was named best national-cuisine concept in Russia at the Premiya bystrykh (Премия быстрых) quick-service awards.

A decade on #

Ten years after the first pavilion, Safin leads a company rebuilt restaurant by restaurant with investor partners. The two counts published in December 2025 and January 2026 put it at between about 11 and 17 restaurants, with about ten investor partners. He co-owns the management company that holds the trademarks with Kamaliev and Gilmutdinov, his two co-founders.

Selling a national cuisine as fast food means winning over people for whom it is not home cooking, and Safin is frank that the work is unfinished. “Sometimes, of course, we doubt ourselves, because we’re not selling pizza,” he said in December 2025. “It’s hard to make people fall in love with something that isn’t their own.” He went on in the same breath: “But I believe the real peak is still ahead, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this.”

Last updated: October 19, 2026

Researched 33 sources in Russian.