Matei Dumitrescu is one of the four founders of the Cosul de Legume (vegetable basket) business. He is in charge of the business to business side of things, his partner Andrei Barbu, a former IT sector employee is in charge of the production on the land in Valea Macrisului and their wives, a psychologist and an architect, are in charge of marketing, communication and customer relations.
“The experience of each of us played a part at some point,” says Matei Dumitrescu.
“It was with Andrei’s help that we developed the website and the delivery monitoring system, his wife, Alexandra, an architect by trade, helped develop the plastic greenhouses and the storage facility, while Sabina, my wife, who is a psychologist, teaches parenting classes where she not only discusses education but also children’s nutrition, identifying the needs of health-conscious consumers.”
The idea to start Cosul de Legume came up in 2011, when Andrei and Alexandra Barbu began looking for healthy products for their little girl.
“We did not have a source of healthy food so we decided we should grow it ourselves.” This is how Dumitrescu says he ended up joining Barbu in 2012, when demand for organic vegetables increased.
The two families are now growing organic vegetables at their 16-hectare farm in Valea Macrisului, near the city of Urziceni, southern Romania, such as Swiss chard, purple tomatoes, yellow and white carrots and kale. They also grow potatoes on a two-hectare plot in Cheile Oltetului and have a small logistics warehouse near Bucharest for deliveries.
The entrepreneurs also have several hundreds chickens at the Valea Macrisului farm used for meat and eggs. They also work with several partner farms, some already certified as organic, others in the process of converting to organic farming. They sell the products via their website by order or subscription and the customers get their fresh produce basket every Tuesday and Saturday delivered to their door or to the about 30 partner centers.
The two families invested about EUR50,000 in the business, which broke even last year, when it generated EUR100,000 revenue, with a positive outlook for this year, as well.
“We sold prepaid subscriptions in March worth almost as much as the entire vegetable revenue of last year,” says Dumitrescu, who was paid in advance for future costs.
They are not the only people who moved from Bucharest to the countryside. National Statistics Institute data show that almost half a million Romanians chose to move to the countryside in 2009-2012.
Voluntary simplicity or downshifting is gaining ground in Romania, as well.
Another city dweller turned organic farmer is Marin Dumbrava, a former air force engineer, who was even deployed to Iraq for a several-week mission once. After buying an about one-hectare plot of farmland in Joita, Giurgiu, 15 kilometers away from Bucharest, his interests changed.
He is now spending most of his time working at the farm because “you cannot just sit in front of the laptop and coordinate things from there. You have to do it yourself, that’s the only way you’ll learn.”
The first year after buying the land, 2005, he planted alfalfa, the following two years he planted fruit trees and grapevine and in 2008 when he retired, he built two plastic greenhouses and started growing all sorts of vegetables. He has invested more than EUR30,000 so far and rejoices in hearing satisfied customers say they have not eaten such tasty vegetables in a long time.
He expects profit from his business, Biodumbrava, to come in about five years. He has about 100 monthly customers ordering products via the website, but many of them do not constantly buy from him.
“That’s the problem of an organic farmer, customers are always researching, trying to find cheaper and tasty products, which is impossible do with organic farming.”
He plans to turn Biodumbrava into a brand and rent or buy more land to expand his farm.
Victoria Mihaela Buligonea created the Legume Fericite (Happy Vegetables) business to sell the organic fruit and vegetables she grows in her own garden, which she manages from an office overlooking the two plastic greenhouses she has. An economist by trade, after graduating from the Marketing Faculty of Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE) Buligonea worked for multinational companies, such as Brewerie Holdings (a group of breweries that no longer exists under this name from which Ciuc spun off) and the finance company in the Renault Group. Unhappy with her line of work, which she had chosen because ASE was trendy when she was picking her college, she took a year off to do what she really loved.
She first thought of building something around dance therapy, which was a hobby of hers, but then ended up building a business based on the vegetables ‘right under my nose’. She already had a crop in her own garden and after a year when it yielded more than the family needed, she found there was room for development on this line of business.
She also had the help of a medicinal plant researcher, who helped her start organic vegetable farming. She first grew vegetables on a 5,000 square meter plot but then expanded to six hectares to meet demand and among her crops are root crops, legumes and herbs (mint, basil, summer savory and sage). The entrepreneur estimates production to reach 70 to 100 tons of vegetables to be sold via the website.
The company had about 100 constant customers in 2013, and many more that shopped on its website occasionally, because they usually buy from several organic food stores.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)