Victor Hromadsky is our client and founder of Budu Coffee. He told how he promotes quality coffee among Ukrainians.

The idea to start a business came back in 2016, when I worked as a brand chef-barista. Then my best friend from university went to the United States, where he worked for a year at the Michelin restaurant - "Fiola", and returned to Ukraine with the desire to apply their experience and start their own business together.

I was faced with a choice: to continue working with the opportunity to become a partner of the people I worked for, or to start my business from scratch. In the end, I decided to go free and try my hand at the market as a co-owner of a coffee shop.

Our start-up capital was 5-7 thousand dollars. We were lucky that a friend of my partner offered us free premises where we could make repairs and start a business.

We opened a cafe in Podil, on the street. Hlybochytska. Last year, after 4 years of operation, we sold it, and it still operates successfully under our brand.

This stage has already passed, we want to go further and increase the scale of projects.

                         The right place is 50% of the result for the cafe

We are now looking for a place to open a larger coffee shop in a different format. When opening a coffee shop, its success strongly depends on the location of the institution: some of our regular visitors came to us for coffee from Vokzalnaya, and sometimes from Kyiv region. Conversely, there may be cool service and product, but if you are not in the right place, there is a risk that there will be very few guests.

After 2019, we started working on a new direction of B2C. Now we equip offices with new high-quality equipment, supply coffee.

            Most Ukrainians still drink low-quality instant coffee

We have a myth that drinking coffee is too expensive to drink at home. At the same time, buying instant coffee, which is also quite expensive, you pay not for quality, but for a very expensive technology of sublimation of granulated coffee.

If you buy quality grain at a price of 500-600 UAH per kilogram, one cup will cost you 6-7 UAH.

In addition, unfortunately, many people who lived in the Soviet Union or in the 90's, formed a strong belief: if bitter - then it's a good coffee. And they no longer perceive other tastes. However, they do not know that this bitterness was actually caused by low-quality Indian robusta.

But we want to show that there is another product - high quality and affordable. Therefore, we are actively developing a site with an interactive wheel of flavors. Its purpose is to make coffee selection easier for the average person. Only specialists or coffee lovers understand, for example, the description of the grain on the package and can choose coffee to taste. Ordinary people do not understand the methods of processing grain, its roasting. It is for them that we create a special automated algorithm that will help you choose your favorite coffee.

Do you like the citrus flavor of grains, berries or dried fruits? The generator selects the spectrum. For example, nut. Do you like almonds? Then try the Brazilian yellow bourbon grains. The taste wheel takes this into account whether you like coffee with sour or bitter and chooses a balanced taste or gives recommendations on which coffee goes best with milk.

We registered the trademark immediately to protect ourselves legally. And we did it just in time, because later visitors started telling us that there was a coffeeshop with our name in Obolon. Our naming is really popular and many interpret it, even then we decided that we need to protect ourselves legally.