By Jozef Tvardzík

Copyright sme

Štefan and Nadežda Demeter turned a loss-making cannery in Rimavská Sobota into Slovakia’s largest producer of jams. Their family firm, Riso-R, produces over 3,000 tons of jam every year from fresh and frozen fruit.

“Our unfulfilled dream is to have our own orchards – to grow our own fruit and make jam from it,” says the company’s founder, Nadežda Demeterová. She and her husband, Stefan, have been making jam for three decades.

From the very beginning, their two sons – Michal and Rastislav – have also worked in the business. They say the boys could easily take over, but that has not yet happened. Although the parents are at retirement age, they remain energetic and still see themselves as a full part of the company.

The four-member family operates like a seasoned and well-coordinated team of managers. They take strategic decisions together, but each has his or her own responsibilities and tasks within the company, complementing each another.

Thanks to this excellent cooperation, Riso-R is thriving financially. The past two years have been particularly outstanding: the company doubled its turnover, while profits have increased fivefold.

“We are constantly looking for new customers. At present, we are doing well in the Czech Republic, where we still see great potential,” explains Michal, who serves as the company’s sales director.

In the beginning, four families

The Demeters entered jam production by a demanding route. Both trained as mechanical engineers at university and, under the communist regime, worked in entirely different fields. Nadežda was a teacher and later director of a care home for the elderly. Štefan worked at the state agriculture-food firm Poľnohospodársko-potravinársky Kombinát in Rimavská Sobota, where he was responsible for purchasing machinery and production technologies.

After the fall of the regime, state enterprises in Rimavská Sobota were privatised. Among them were the sugar refinery, brewery, dairy, meat-processing plant – and also the cannery, which no one else was interested in.