Lebedev takes the biscuit as a billionaire baker
HE ENLISTED in the KGB in his 20s, acquired a bank in his 30s and a British newspaper in his 40s.
Now Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev’s career has taken another astonishing twist.
Alongside his partner, former model Elena Perminova, he has, I can disclose, become a baker and biscuit-maker — and the couple are launching their products next month in Britain.
Improbable though it sounds, baking runs in Lebedev’s blood. ‘Alexander Lebedev’s great-grandfather was a baker from Nizhny
Novgorod, so he feels he is reigniting a family tradition,’ one of his spokesmen tells me. But it’s fair to say that no bakery in Tsarist Russia ever quite matched the sophistication of what emerges from the Len & Grechka bakery, as the couple’s Russian company is called. Its loaves include organic, glutenfree quinoa, and organic, gluten-free turmeric, while its biscuits are of a Fortnum & Mason level of indulgence, such as organic, gluten-free ‘tiger’ chocolate chip cookies. ‘Every mother will understand the difficulty of hunting not just for healthy but also for really delicious food,’ Elena, 33, tells me. She explains it took her and Lebedev almost two years to bake the perfect gluten-free bread, in the process establishing Russia’s very first gluten-free bakery with more than 40 different products on the shelf.
‘With Len & Grechka, we want to offer a greater choice for British people to make informed decisions about the nutrients they put in their bodies,’ adds Elena. ‘If we can get people to switch from nutrientdevoid white bread to our buckwheat, it would be a beautiful thing.’
A bag of eight chocolate chip cookies costs £3.30, while a loaf of gluten-free buckwheat and linseed sprouted sliced bread is £5.15 — in Whole Foods and Planet Organic stores in London next month.
Bring on the revolution.