In 2017, the segment’s sales totalled 236,638 tonnes. The rise was mainly driven by higher sales of branded sausages and ready-to-cook pork products across the modern food retail formats, and by broader geography of supplies to the Urals and North-West regions.

The sausage division makes a variety of products from pork, chicken, turkey and beef, including cooked, cooked and smoked, semi-smoked and smoked sausages, salami, hot dogs, smoked meat, deli meats, hams and cold cuts. The pork division produces raw meat, ready-to-cook products and minced meat.

We make our meat products from high-quality chilled meat supplied by domestic producers, with our own pig farms being the major source. Beef comes from farms. At each facility, veterinary experts thoroughly check all feedstock for compliance with quality and safety standards. We use only natural food additives, such as salt, pepper and spices, to manufacture meat products, and real wood chips to smoke meat. All this, along with the multi-stage taste and quality control of finished products carried out by our technologists and quality experts, has helped us earn and retain the trust of both our partners and consumers.

In 2017, the Group continued to consolidate its leadership in the smoked and semi-smoked sausage market. Our share in major retail chains (sausage segment) gained 14 % to hit a total of 60 %. In 2018, we will be offering consumers new types of high-quality cured sausage.

We are also working to strengthen our leadership in the smoked sausage market by launching a factory in the Kashira district boasting an annual capacity of 30,000 tonnes, making it the largest facility both in Russia and Europe. It will be fully automated and will feature state-of-the-art technology. Plants like this one are a strategic initiative the Group will focus on going forward.

In the reporting period, the Group kept focusing on raw meat and ready-to-cook products and on growing its share in the key markets – Moscow and St Petersburg. In 2017, contribution of these products to total segment sales grew to 39 %. In 2018, we have launched new production lines at the Penza Meat and Poultry Plant, thus doubling the annual capacity of the semi-smoked sausage factory. We are also planning to increase our cutting capacity by 30 %. Another key target for 2018 is to ramp up the production of minced meat and related products, such as meatballs, burgers, cutlets, kupati, etc. in line with market demand.

The Cherkizovsky Meat Processing Plant in north-eastern Moscow is the Group’s flagship facility in the segment. The segment also includes the Penzensky Meat and Poultry Processing Plant featuring an in-house slaughtering facility, the Ulyanovsky Meat Processing Plant, the Otechestvenny Product Meat Processing Plant in Pravdinsk, Kaliningrad region, and the Dankov Meat Processing Plant in the Lipetsk region, a state-of-the-art pork slaughtering and cutting facility.