Bulgarian market leader in dry food

The company’s management team (from left): Dr. Yoto P. Yotov, technical adviser, Pavlen Hristov Panov, manager, und Christo Dimitrov, production manager.
“Our extruded dry food should be pitched between the high- and low-priced products available in our country, part of which are imports”, says Pavlen Panov, proprietor of the company. “We offer good quality at a customary low price. The consumer pays the equivalent of one e per kilo in speciality pet stores.” Compared with imported products, Pavlen Panov has the advantage of being able to offer a product that is always fresh together with low transportation costs, thanks to the short distances involved in moving the goods within Bulgaria. He started out producing feed for livestock, alongside a very small volume of pet food. Since then the company’s house brand has been “Ljubimetz”, available in six dog and cat food varieties: “Adult”, “Energy”, “Breakfast”, “Junior”, “Athlete” and “Caprice”. The “Hit”-brand is a new addition, designed as a brand at an entry-level price.
Great emphasis is placed on manual work at Furajny Hrany Ltd., with the extruder output of two tonnes per hour being put into bags that are printed and glued in-house. The bags are filled with the finished mixture and loaded onto pallets.
The company grows many of the natural ingredients used in the dry food, such as wheat, maize and sunflowers, itself on around 2,500 acres of leased agricultural land. Two extruders produce alternately up to two tonnes of dry food per hour, with over 200 t leaving the factory each month. Dog food accounts for 160 t and cat food for 40 t. “Although the machines have a capacity of 1 000 t, the volume of sales is not yet up to this level”, comments Yoto Yotov, technical adviser to the company. The monthly output is to be increased to 250 t in 2004. Pavlen Panov is especially proud of his company’s ISO 9001:2000 certification. To maintain this, samples taken from ongoing production are examined daily in the in-house laboratory to guarantee the quality and composition of the products. The effort has reaped rewards: Furajny Hrany Ltd. responded to the prediction of national economic growth of just under three per cent with growth of ten per cent in the second half of 2003.
Furajny Hrany’s factory is in Lovech, approx. 150 km to the north of the Bulgarian capital Sofia.
There are dog and cat owners in Bulgaria who live out in rural areas, most of whom probably have no idea that special foods even exist for their pets…