Veteran Volodymyr Skosogorenko has received funds to expand production of processing garlic into paste and fermented black garlic — into spices, sauces and single-use stacks.
“Tell me, do you like to chop garlic and then wash that garlic press, clean it with a toothpick? No? In our business, it was important to find the pain point and solve it. We have found it – we free people from washing garlic presses,” Volodymyr says with a smile about his business.
Volodymyr Skosohorenko defended Ukraine in 2014-2015 in the Luhansk region. After discharging the military service, he began to look for himself and started studying psychology in order to help himself and others. In particular, he now volunteers as a psychologist working with wounded military personnel and those who are undergoing rehabilitation.
He decided to go into business because he wanted to earn money… to help combatants with psychological rehabilitation and to fund projects aimed to provide psychological rehabilitation to veterans of the Russian-Ukrainian war and their families.
Volodymyr shares that his own business started for him out of certain interest: how he can apply his combat skills in entrepreneurship? And now he confidently tells everyone that it is necessary to do business with veterans, if only because they want to make the product better, useful and with better quality.
How did it all begin? With his veteran friends, Volodymyr was looking for his business niche for a long time, and then he remembered that he had his two legal hectares of land, which he had leased to a farmer. This farmer grew garlic on that land.
Volodymyr invited him to talk and realized that this was it. So in 2021, he started his own business. His team consisted of several veterans. Later, Volodymyr Skosogorenko began studying the plant in more detail and realized that it was a veteran product.
He says: “There are a lot of hypertensives in the army, and garlic lowers blood pressure and has many other useful properties.”
After February 24th, almost all of Volodymyr’s brothers went to the front, and due to the injuries he received in 2014-2015, he was told to keep home front and create new jobs for them, so that there would be somewhere to return to after the Victory.
Now Volodymyr is dealing with the information front, monitoring the mental state of volunteers, and when everything more or less normalized, he continued to develop the “garlic” business. Volodymyr is currently working on two areas — creating small batches of the garlic paste and spices from fermented black garlic. He says that garlic, like lard, is a superfood.
“What is my dream? I want to see empty packaging from our products in the garbage!”, – shares the veteran. — “And if globally, then after filling Vinnytsia and all of Ukraine with our garlic products, I`m going to enter the international market as well.”
Volodymyr motivates with his thoughts: “In business, the idea is not so important, because there are many ideas floating in the air, but they often disappear, because there was no necessary knowledge for implementation. It is important to understand. Because when we started, we focused on one market, but it didn’t work. Then we changed the vector and everything began working. The main thing is stubbornness.”
