Despite being the CEO of one of Cyprus’ largest bakeries, Costas Zorbas still loves to knead dough and bake bread. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
Ethical questions abound. When you talk to a CEO and allow them to babble on about how splendid their company is, how committed they are to excellence, what top-class raw materials they use, doesn’t it amount to a form of free advertising? Even worse, when you talk to Costas Zorbas – President and CEO of Zorbas Bakeries – how do you talk around the fact that his company has become quite dominant in the past two decades, often elbowing aside smaller rivals? At one point I suggest to him that eventually we’ll be left with just the ‘Big Three’ bakeries in Cyprus: Zorbas, Marangos and Pandora, a scenario he vehemently denies – but when I look around (at least in Nicosia) all I see are small bakeries closing down, making ‘our daily bread’ an increasingly industrial, non-artisanal affair.
I go to his office with mixed feelings; yet I must say I like Costas Zorbas. He’s young-looking (he’ll be 46 this month), with steely eyes, a full head of hair and occasional flashes of a boyish, rather rascally smile. He’s impatient, answering questions before they’re even complete, and full of nervous energy: he smokes a cigarette with quick, deft movements, and punctuates his answers by tapping a pen on the table. “Hello! I know you, don’t I?” he calls out as I come in, and I don’t think he does – though I live quite close to Zorbas headquarters and he might’ve seen me around, or in one of his shops – but it breaks the ice quite nicely. He’s courteous: his mobile phone rings twice as we speak, but he ignores it (unlike the many people who feel they absolutely have to answer, even if it’s just to say ‘I’ll call you back’). He’s also candid, telling me without any prompting that the company’s profits have been down in the past three years, a result of rising costs across the board.
Zorbas is still huge, of course. The company uses 7-8,000 tons of flour a year, and churns out 500 breads an hour at each of its many branches. Its size is surely part of what makes it a target for a number of charges – all of which I put to him, and all of which he answers, though of course whether critics will be satisfied with his answers is another matter. To wit:
Why is bread so expensive in Cyprus? “We have the cheapest bread in Europe,” he says at one point, and I do a double take. Didn’t he read the Euro-survey naming Cyprus bread as the most expensive in the EU? Didn’t a group of consumers go on ‘bread and milk strike’ for a week in late September, as a form of protest? He nods vigorously: Eurostat says we’re 17th – ie among the most expensive – he admits, “but with the wrong wheat”. That survey made no distinction between soft wheat, which is what they use for bread in Central and Eastern Europe, and hard wheat, which is what we use in Cyprus. Hard and durum wheat are twice the price, he adds, costing €600-700 per ton of flour, unlike soft wheat which costs around €350. “If you try to buy our bread in France, Italy, Germany or wherever, you’ll find it anywhere from €4 up to €12,” claims Costas – adding that Zorbas hasn’t raised their prices in two years, despite rising costs.
Why do they use so many plastic bags in their packaging? Doesn’t he know it’s environmentally unfriendly? But the bags are now bio-degradable, he points out – and it’s also a matter of food hygiene. It might seem excessive when sales clerks give you separate bags for your purchases, but you can’t put milk in the same bag as hot bread; it’ll spoil. Besides, it’s not like consumers are being forced at gunpoint to accept the plastic bags. All they have to do is say no.
Why does Zorbas always seem to open shops next to their rivals, as if trying to close them down? Is that a deliberate strategy? “Never!” he replies, bristling. “We’ve never opened next to someone else – not unless they bothered us first. Never! It’s a principle of ours!” I mention a couple of Nicosia examples (one in Plati, the other in Pallouriotissa), but he demurs. In Pallouriotissa, he says, they had a small shop and a rival opened a much bigger bakery across the street – so yes, the company built a bigger shop next to the rival. “We had to make a move,” he pleads. “Let’s be fair.” In Plati, admittedly, there was no Zorbas, but they were supplying four small bakeries which were put out of business by a newly-opened rival. “Should I have abandoned all the business I was doing, and not fight for it?” he asks rhetorically. “So we opened a bakery in Plati.”
Why don’t they employ any Cypriots, preferring immigrants from Eastern Europe (who, implicitly, accept lower salaries)? “Tell the Cypriots to come, and we’ll hire them!” he quips. “Quite simply, for 10 years now we’ve been looking for Cypriots to come and work in our shops, and we can’t find any”. Admittedly, it varies by region; in Limassol, for instance, the majority of sales clerks are indeed Cypriots – but in Paphos it’s entirely immigrants, who of course do a fine job and can’t exactly be dismissed now that Cypriots are beginning to trickle through, due to the recession.
So why have they been so slow in coming? Is it the hours? The salaries? Costas shakes his head: “Perhaps we’ve forgotten how to work, here in Cyprus,” he replies. “Unfortunately – and I say this with a lot of sadness – we’ve all become accustomed to ready-made things, to convenience. Our lives have changed for the worse. When things get a bit difficult, we go ‘Ah!’” – he leans back sharply, imitating someone drawing back from problems instead of facing them.
“Because the new generation hasn’t learned how to work,” he adds, warming to his theme. “They’re educated, I admit. They’ve gone out, they’ve spent time, they sat their ass down and studied hard. But when the moment comes that [the work] starts to hurt, when it starts to burn, when it starts to make them sweat – well, that’s when they say ‘What do I want with this kind of job?’ They haven’t learned how to hurt, how to really work.”
Costas himself learned early, baking bread from the age of 11 – so young that he had to stand on a wooden Coca-Cola crate to reach the oven. This was in the village of Athienou, traditionally a bread-making centre though in fact his father was a cattle farmer. That changed abruptly when the farm, in now-occupied Pirogi, was lost to the Turks, leaving the family in dire straits with three young kids (Costas’ brothers Tasos and Demetris, three and seven years younger respectively, plus sister Evanthia who’s 12 years younger) and no visible means of support – so Dad built a bread oven in the backyard and young Costas worked to help the family, a boy doing a man’s job: “I was working like a regular employee, at 11.”
Even now, Zorbas is a family business. “I decided –” he begins, talking of the big expansion in the 1980s, then immediately corrects himself: “We decided as a family…”. Tasos is in charge of production and Demetris (despite training as an airline pilot) is General Manager – “but we’re all the same,” adds Costas quickly, “there’s nothing to say ‘this one’s a boss and this one isn’t’, God forbid. We’re three brothers together”. The sister doesn’t seem to feature much, despite being head of the company’s catering business – and there’s something quite old-fashioned about Costas, a touch of the old village patriarchy. “I won’t have a man selling bread,” he says later (he actually says “a male”, in Greek), insisting on strictly-defined gender roles when it comes to Zorbas employees: “Women do the selling, at the cash desks, while the males bake the tyropittas [cheese pies], handle the metal trays and so on. It’s a different thing. You give the heavy work to the men”. He has a poi
nt but it still sounds a bit 20th-century, ditto when he shakes his head at the notion of calcium-enriched bread (“No no no, we don’t do things like that”), or when he claims that “90 per cent of people do what their parents did”. That might’ve been true 20 years ago – but surely things have changed.
Will his own kids (twin daughters, now aged 18) do what he does? That depends, he shrugs. Like all the Zorbas children, his girls worked summers at the bakery throughout their teenage years (they were at the cash desks; his brother’s sons were down in the factory), but that doesn’t mean they’ll make a career out of it. What that depends on, quite simply, is whether they love working with bread. Not just like it, says Costas, but actually love it – and this is where he grows sentimental, his nervous energy subsiding slightly, the tapping pen momentarily still. “The most important thing in a person’s life is doing what you love,” he declares. “But really to love it. To look at bread, to hold it, to smell it. If it falls on the floor to pick it up and kiss it, like they did in the old days.”
‘How about you?’ I ask. ‘Are you just a businessman, or – ?’
“I’m a baker,” he replies instantly. “I’m a traditional baker.”
‘Are you still involved with the baking?’
“I am involved. In fact today, as soon as we finish here, I’m going to go knead some dough.”
‘You’re going to knead dough?’ I repeat, trying to keep the yeah-right expression out of my voice.
“Yes, I’m going to leave here and knead some dough.”
‘Where are you going to knead this dough?’
“Today I’m going to Plati. Yesterday I went somewhere else.”
Back in the old days, Costas Zorbas did a lot of bread-making, getting up at 2 in the morning to go to work (“I missed out on seeing my girls when they were little,” he admits sadly). Now he’s CEO, mostly in the office with meetings and phone calls – but bread is “in my blood,” he says with feeling. “If you look at my blood, you’ll find flour flowing there!” Clearly, the baking is industrial now; 8,000 tons of flour speak for themselves. Clearly, his spiel about “traditional” bread-making is partly a case of bigging up the company. Clearly, when he tells me that Zorbas is certified by AIB International (an American bakery inspectorate) and ranked 3rd in the whole of Europe, he does it with a not-so-hidden agenda.
Yet the sharp, aggressive CEO co-exists with the old-fashioned bread-maker – and when I ask the big question, whether it’s healthy for society to depend on big companies (like his own) instead of small artisans, he sighs deeply. “Look,” he begins. “Let me tell you something. This” – another deep sigh – “is a very difficult question. The answer will always be wrong, whatever it is. The big guy can offer better quality at a better price – but then again, the little guy gets destroyed. That’s why I say it’s the wrong answer. It’s a question of feelings, a question of soul, not just…” He shakes his head, letting the sentence trail off. “That’s why it’s a difficult question for me, because I’m a little bit sensitive.”
Is he really? Hard to say, when you’re talking to a businessman about his business – but the love of making bread, a craft he’s been plying since childhood, is surely sincere. “Back when I was baking, and involved in production every day, I was better off,” says Costas Zorbas wistfully. Baking bread is “a special thing,” he adds. “A special thing. When you knead a loaf of bread, or make a tyropitta, when you create something then take it out of the oven and… Well, that’s a special feeling. That’s why I say I’m still a baker. And believe me, I love baking bread much more than I do sitting in an office”. Call me a sucker, but I believe him.
