Mabius Culinary Startup Center: Moscow, London, Riga, Shenzhen

MOSCOW, October 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

Russian startup incubator Mabius announces its plan to open new business accelerators in England, Latvia, and China by 2018, and is also ready to work with new Italian products, helping them to enter Russian and Asian markets.

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The role of the Moscow center is to identify promising new food products from Russian ingredients, which have great potential in world markets, especially due to the weakening ruble. The European centers will not only work with local startups, but also become a food technology supplier for other centers. Ideas and ingredients will be sourced from Russia, and technology from Europe. Already this year, the first products have been created in the Moscow center, and will begin testing in China in preparation for release across Asian trade networks.

"We are collaborating a lot with Asia on our varied projects and understand how it works. We have a reliable partner in China- the leading Asian agribusiness group Wilmar International Ltd. If it weren't for our long-standing business relations with Wilmar, I wouldn't even try to enter these markets," said Ivan Sidorok, co-owner and board member of Nizhny Novgorod Fats & Oils Group (NMGK) and Russian partner in the leading Asian agribusiness group Wilmar International Ltd. "At the same time, we also help with access to Russian retail."

"By definition, Mabius is an innovative plan to bring new co-created products to the markets in partnership with big business startups and active consumers (consumer co-create) and is an alternative to the classic R&D department at a big company. A distinctive peculiarity of R&D is its difficulty in predicting the final results of their research and possible commercialization.  The co-create system, of course, cannot 100% guarantee results, but it reduces the risks, costs, and time in bringing the product to the market. This approach is now practiced by many of the world's major companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, and LEGO. It is mutually-beneficial cooperation: the big company saves money on developing new products and buys ready-made brands that already have customers, and an aspiring entrepreneur gets a chance to start and scale a business. Currently, Mabius's main customer is the corporate group NMGK. As a result of its industry profile, Mabius is first and foremost considering projects and products in these categories: pastries, desserts, cookies, sweets, snacks, and of course, sauces, dressings, and oils. 

SOURCE Mabius