The art of culinary: building a global business. An interview with Alexander Blanc
Reading time: 7 minutes

by Olga Annushkina
SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management
Growing abroad in the food services industry is challenging: local tastes and flavours, local food rituals, local religious and cultural constraints, local legislation on safety and quality. Add the perishability issue, high transportation costs and constantly changing cross border tariff and non-tariff barriers and you receive a perfect recipe of a business context for “fortune favours the bold” type of people. Exactly how I would describe Alexander Blanc, a Russian-Israeli, whom I met in 1999 in Milan when we both worked in management consulting.
Today we discuss the differences of doing business in three different locations – Moscow, Singapore and Bucharest – for Culinaryon, an international culinary school, the “Disneyland of culinary schools”.