Russian small business offered a "Big shelf"

X5 grocery retail company announced the launch of the Bolshaya Polka online platform in partnership with SME Corporation at the Eastern Economic Forum.

The project brings together all the company's initiatives for small and medium-sized businesses. "X5 makes a big bet on working with SMEs and annually launches new projects that help entrepreneurs. Today, such initiatives include not only assistance and support in establishing sales, but also educational projects, logistics solutions, franchising and much more," commented Boris Ogarkov, Director of Government Relations at X5.

Among the key projects included in the X5 Big Shelf is the Agroagregator, which unites farmers with small sales volumes. The operator conducts pre-sale preparation of fruit and vegetable products and forms centralized supplies to retail chains. X5 cooperates with 17 aggregators, the total purchase of farm products by the end of the year will exceed 80 thousand tons.

Another project is the "Farmer's Island", in which the products of local manufacturers are placed in separate zones of the shop-in-shop format. X5 has opened 47 "islands" in its stores and plans to continue the development of the project.

"Agrocontracts" are also available for entrepreneurs — when a company negotiates with producers on the future supply of fruits and vegetables to X5 retail chains with advance payment of the harvest.

The Farmers Academy small Business program provides training for entrepreneurs by retail chain specialists. During the course, the best cases are analyzed and measures to support small businesses are discussed.

According to Ogarkov, the company will continue to develop existing tools, and also plans to create new ones, increasing the number of small businesses among partners and increasing their share in turnover.

X5 emphasized that the company aims to develop suppliers from scratch and train them, jointly develop partnership models, and combine government and business efforts to support SMEs. Today, more than half of X5's partners are small manufacturers, and the share of local suppliers in the range of retail chains in the regions reaches 30%.

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