Bahetle

Which half to keep

The trouble arrived through the balance sheet. In February 2015 Bahetle’s annual debt service doubled, from ₽400m to ₽800m: ₽400m more a year owed to lenders before any store had paid its rent or its staff. The chain announced cuts of about 600 jobs, a tenth of a workforce that then numbered around 6,000. Debt on that scale could sink the whole business, not just the weaker stores.

The stores did not empty at once; revenue peaked in 2016, KazanFirst reported. In October 2017 the whole network was offered for sale. Vedomosti reported a valuation of ₽10bn: ₽9.35bn for the Tatarstan stores and ₽650m for Moscow. The two halves were not alike. Tatarstan was home: the flagship and head office on Pavlyukhina Street, the stores in Kazan, Nizhnekamsk and Naberezhnye Chelny, and the farm in the Nizhnekamsk district. Moscow was the business on Tverskaya Street, opened in 2006 with a sale in mind from the start. Latypova said publicly that she would sell only the Moscow business and keep the stores at home. The alternative was to let Tatarstan go, the half priced at ₽9.35bn, and with it the counters her own kitchens supplied. Keeping it meant passing up the larger part of the price.

The sale did not complete as offered. In July 2018 the founding managers were replaced, and a new executive team took over the day-to-day running of the chain; Latypova remained general director of the operating company. She says that Rustam Minnikhanov, the president of Tatarstan, told her Bahetle had to be preserved as a national brand.

What she could keep was the production. The workshops opened in 2004 had given Bahetle something a pure retailer does not own: a supply of food made to its own recipes, which could be sold through its shops or its canteens. A retailer under the same pressure would have had only its leases to sell. Bahetle could close a store and keep the kitchen that had stocked it. The choice of 2017 rested on that difference.

A kitchen behind the counter

The business is older than the name over the door. Kommersant dates the trade-and-production enterprise that became Bahetle to 1991, when Latypova, until then a manager in Kazan’s state catering system, opened a cooperative café and ran a shuttle trade by rail from Tynda with her partner, Rinat Mukhametshin. The first venture was a café, so the business cooked before it sold anyone else’s goods. “Everything we learned by touch, inventing something new on the go every day. When people ask me who my teachers were, I answer: ‘They were the difficulties I had to overcome,’” she told Business Online on 26 February 2020. The first Bahetle supermarket opened on Sibirsky Trakt in Kazan in December 1998, months after the rouble collapse. A flagship and head office on Pavlyukhina Street followed in 2000, a store in Nizhnekamsk in 2002 and one on Zorge Street in Kazan in 2003, the year Mukhametshin became a co-founder.

In 2004 Bahetle opened frozen-food workshops with their own rail siding and set up Bahetle Agro to farm former state land in the Nizhnekamsk district. From then on much of the Tatar food on its counters, its pelmeni among them, came from its own workshops; Latypova says the dishes are made by hand, with no automated lines. A supermarket that farms, freezes and ships its own food by rail is a manufacturer with a retail front. The stores that followed were more counters for the same kitchen: Yamasheva prospekt in Kazan in 2004, Ershova Street and Naberezhnye Chelny in 2005, Orenburgsky Trakt in 2009.

The Moscow half was built to be sold from the start. In 2006 Bahetle entered Moscow with a store at Tverskaya 22, in the Summit business centre, planning a business there that it could later sell. The same year it opened social canteens, which gave the kitchens a second set of customers. Gastromarket, a partner company, opened franchise Bahetle stores in Novosibirsk in 2010 and in Barnaul in 2012, carrying the name to Siberia without Bahetle owning the shops. In 2013 the kitchens catered for the Summer Universiade in Kazan: food made in volume, to order, for people who would never walk down a supermarket aisle. On 15 January 2014 Bahetle-Halal opened at Tukaya 64, in Kazan’s Old Tatar Quarter, certified by the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Tatarstan (DUM RT), and a store on Chistopolskaya Street in Kazan followed in 2015. By then the company ran stores in Kazan, Nizhnekamsk, Naberezhnye Chelny and Moscow, franchise stores in Siberia, canteens, workshops and a farm, and its kitchens supplied all of it.

From shop floor to factory

The closures came in stages, and the half she kept was not spared them. Bahetle-Halal on Tukaya Street and the store on Yamasheva prospekt closed in 2023. The Naberezhnye Chelny store closed in 2025, and the first store, on Sibirsky Trakt, has also closed. Each closure took a shop out of the estate without taking a recipe out of the kitchen, and the payroll shrank with the estate.

The production side grew while the shop front shrank, and it moved onto a larger site. In May 2020 Latypova’s daughter, Elvira Kharlamova, registered Fabrika Bahetle in Zelenodolsk as its sole owner. The first phase of the Zelenodolsk factory opened on 21 November 2023, with a capacity of 30 tonnes a day; more than ₽600m was invested in that first phase, a sum the sources do not tie to either family company. Its capacity was added to the kitchens that had supplied the stores since 2004, not substituted for them. In December 2023 her grandson, Erik Kharlamov, founded a second company, Fabrika Bahetle-1. Both factories belong to family companies, not to Bahetle itself. The new capacity went up in the half Latypova had kept: Zelenodolsk is in Tatarstan, west of Kazan, and what it makes reaches the same customers the kitchens already served, through her own stores, the canteens and the franchise partners.

That arrangement is what “vertically integrated” means in Bahetle’s case. The company, by its own count, makes about 12,500 tonnes a year across its kitchens and the family’s factory, and its own supermarkets are one outlet for that food, beside the social canteens it has run since 2006 and the franchise stores in Siberia. The flagship and head office are still on Pavlyukhina Street, where the company has been since 2000, and the stores on Ershova Street, Chistopolskaya Street and Orenburgsky Trakt remain on the company’s list. The half she kept holds the kitchens, the factory beside them and the shops that sell their food, while the half she offered for sale has no counter left in it.

The Moscow half went in 2026, nine years after she named it as the part to sell. The store at Tverskaya 22, opened in 2006, closed on 30 April as its lease ended. Its closing took Bahetle’s name off a Moscow shop front for the first time since 2006. The plan had run for two decades: a business opened to be built and sold, offered with the rest of the network in 2017 at ₽650m, and closed when its last lease ran out. Bahetle never sold it. What Latypova let go in Moscow was the smaller of the two prices on the 2017 offer; what she kept in Tatarstan is the part of the business that still cooks and still sells.

Who owns and runs it

Today the operating company has a single owner. Mukhametshin was Latypova’s partner in the 1991 trade and, from 2003, a co-founder. Official biographies date her role as general director of OOO Bekhetle (Бэхетле) from 1994; she has run OOO Bahetle-1 since 2007, and registry data list her as its sole founder, with 100%. The Zelenodolsk factories sit outside that company, in her family’s hands: Fabrika Bahetle is her daughter’s, and Fabrika Bahetle-1, the company behind the Saelra project, is her grandson’s.

What lasted

The company is smaller than at its peak, in revenue and in staff: about 3,500 people in May 2026, by Latypova’s own account, against the roughly 5,000 a Forbes profile once gave, and more than a third fewer than the around 6,000 of 2015. Roughly half of those 3,500, by Latypova’s account, are cooks. The shop front went store by store, ending with Moscow on 30 April 2026. The kitchens that have supplied the shops since 2004 still do, and the Zelenodolsk factory has added 30 tonnes a day since November 2023.

Ownership is simple: registry data list Latypova as the sole owner of OOO Bahetle-1, and she still runs it. Every store Bahetle still operates is in Tatarstan, from the Pavlyukhina Street flagship to Orenburgsky Trakt.

Last updated: November 7, 2026

Researched 27 sources in Russian.