The day Zacusca outsold all Romanian business headlines

The most-read article in the entire business-focused online press on Tuesday, November 3 – as so often happens – came from Agrointeligența: according to SATI data, more than 60,000 people were curious to read about how Oana and Mihai Țolea invested in three hectares of vegetables, and today their canned goods are sold in supermarkets and online.

For comparison: 39,000 readers wanted to know from startupcafe.ro about the tax authority's new procedure for setting social contributions; 27,000 read on economica.net about who actually produces the milk Lidl sells under its Pilos house brand; 20,000 checked out profit.ro's piece on the Pavăl brothers' Dedeman investments in Greece; another 20,000 went to zf.ro for the story on investors nursing losses after buying overpriced Petromidia shares; and 11,000 read on economedia.ro about Greek energy group PPC's acquisition of Flanco.

How did a human-interest feature out-perform the usual fare of taxes, deals and stock market losses? No great mystery here: businesses with broad appeal tend to be the ones you can start with modest capital, while food quality is something everyone cares about, regardless of income bracket.

But the Țolea story carries weight beyond its feel-good factor, challenging some stubbornly defeatist myths along the way: that small-scale farming doesn't pay – turns out it does, if you know what to grow and how; that local producers can't break into supermarket shelves – turns out they can, even if it's far from easy. In a neat twist of irony, the Țoleas only got into making zacuscă (the beloved Romanian vegetable spread) because they were fed up with having their fresh produce rejected, got pushed out of farmers' markets by middlemen, and found themselves burning money on red tape just to access state subsidies.

"With our processed products, there simply wasn't room for us in the open-air markets, we were flat-out squeezed out by middlemen. And there's no justice in that; authorities should be running checks and backing genuine producers. Same goes for subsidies: processing needs real support, not just vegetable production that gets subsidized and then ends up in the trash (...) Roughly speaking, from what I see in the books, we've put in about €500,000 total into this business. We expanded our greenhouse space in 2024 and that's when we tapped into a young farmer support scheme. But honestly, we regret getting tangled up with the young-farmer program and AFIR [the state's agricultural funding agency], we'd have been better off just taking out a bank loan. To score the points we needed, they forced us into requirements that make no sense, especially for Romania; heating greenhouses just isn't worth it here. They could have given us credit for processing instead, which matters far more than bothering to heat greenhouses to grow produce in winter," Mihai Țolea told the Agrointeligența reporter.

What the future holds

Romania is full of farms like this, some smaller, some considerably bigger. Hypermarket procurement standards are no walk in the park, confirms Alice Spiridon, a horticultural engineer and co-founder of the "Grădina Noastră din Fierbinți" Agricultural Cooperative, which has been supplying Metro since 2012 and Carrefour since 2019.

"The hardest part, for me, wasn't anything to do with retail, it was getting our own farm organized. From the start we wanted to meet quality standards worthy of putting food on people's tables, but we ran into trouble on our own turf: professional management. We knew the quality standards inside out, but the real challenge was getting our own people to actually follow them, day in and day out. The lesson is you've got to get your own kitchen running smoothly before you can deliver quality goods," Alice Spiridon said at the Agri4Future conference, organized by the Romanian Farmers' Club as part of Indagra.

"Agriculture for the future": fitting, given this is a sector transforming at least as fast as any other amid the current technological leap. Florian Ciolacu, president of the Romanian Farmers' Club, likens the current moment to the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

"Point one: back then a new technology was emerging, just like AI now. Point two: there was a prolonged, severe drought. Point three: supply chains for key raw materials were disrupted — tin back then, oil and gas now. Civilizations collapsed. What we have on hand as a response today: entrepreneurial education, financial literacy, and digital systems," Ciolacu said at the Agri Next conference hosted by Adevărul.

The new agricultural cooperatives

The Romanian Farmers' Club is an association launched by Agricover in 2018 that has since taken on a life of its own, now bringing together 1,400 farmers working 1.6 million hectares. A similar initiative is CATA – the Community of Young Entrepreneurs in Agriculture – founded two years ago by Gabriel Stoian, the owner of agri-tech company Profeco. CATA now counts just over 400 members and, on the final day of Indagra, hosted the Agripreneurs conference, where farmers took the stage to share their business stories.

"Good things happen in community. If we go it alone, like a lone wolf, we won't succeed – the future doesn't belong to those who go it alone", Stoian says, laying out this new take on the agricultural cooperative – one that can span multiple countries, held together by shared markets and technology.

It's also, about caring what ends up on our plates; at least for Cosmin Negru, founder of Mamaiana, who farms 800 hectares organically in Argeș county.

"Our grandparents knew hunger. We don't. I'm not here to deny that. But somewhere along the way, 'how much can you get per hectare' became the only question that mattered. Yield stopped being a means and became the end goal. And we paid for it with things that never showed up in the books: the soil, the water, the bees, the health of the people living near our fields. But you learn fast that you can't demand more from the land than it has to give. There's a line you can't cross — and if you try, the land sends you the bill," says the farmer, who keeps a deliberately narrow product line: cold-pressed oil, honey, beer, flour and cornmeal, sold through channels including eMAG.

So how can output actually be boosted?

The simplest method to yield more, explains agricultural engineer Mihai Enescu, a lecturer at the Bucharest University of Agronomic Sciences, is forest shelterbelts.

"Any land can be reforested, no matter how degraded it is. Farmers assume they'll lose land and yield. Not true! If a farmer sets aside 4-6% of their land for this, output can actually rise by 20%," Enescu says. By that logic, the parched, desertifying lands of Oltenia, for instance, could be turned from a liability into an opportunity to expand the country's forest cover, the agronomist argues in a research paper.