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“The future is in water and grain,” says Natia Kalandarishvili. She is the co-founder of Graminea, a minimalist but inviting shop in Sololaki whose mission goes beyond just selling the best sourdough in town. The bakery uses endemic Georgian wheat for their bread flour in an effort to support rebalancing the national wheat market – an unusual approach in a bread-heavy cuisine which relies primarily on imported wheat.

Natia and her friend Salome Zakaraia started Graminea on February 7, 2023. Now head baker, Salome was previously a makeup artist by profession, working on film sets. But like many others during the Covid-19 pandemic, she started baking sourdough while she was stuck at home. “Our whole thing is sourdough. We only do sourdough, without any yeast,” Natia says.

The bakery started off selling to businesses around Tbilisi. “We started with B2B because it was really hard to sell from the bakery, because it’s underground,” Natia says. Now, they’re selling to many bars and restaurants around the city, including some familiar names. Natia rattles off part of their list “Ninia’s Garden, They Said Books, Chernyi Cooperative, Shavi and also Bruno, Unfound Doors in Agmashenebeli and No More Mondays is also us. See, we’ve spread!”

And spread they have. In addition to the underground bakery a few streets away on Ivane Machabeli Street, the partners opened their airy, new shop at 11 Giga Lortkipanidze Street in November 2023. In their above-ground business they offer customers a wide range of different sourdoughs and sweet treats, with 22 types of bread sold regularly, and six or so special varieties. “Whole grain, white bread, wheat, buckwheat, chia, oat… In all of these [is] mixed 30 percent Georgian wheat,” Natia says.

“And then we also have this one shelf with things like butter or jams, things that are good on bread.” All of the spreads, sweets and sourdoughs are made by Salome and their team of 12 part-time employees. Prices range from 6 Georgian lari (2 euro) for a small oat bread or tartine, up to 8 lari for the Lomtagora 100-percent Georgian wheat loaf.

“Think globally, act locally is kind of what we do,” Natia tells us. This awareness emerges from Natia’s background working in national security, focusing on the defense policy of Georgia. After studying law and international relations, in 2014 she became a scholar at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and, alongside other civil service roles, has been the civil society representative and the deputy head of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) workgroup at Tbilisi City Hall since 2018.

Natia has brought her professional experience to the bakery. “When I buy wheat I start asking questions like, ‘Where did this come from?’ and ‘How much of the market is owned by Russian wheat?’” She found that the answer was about 85 percent. “It’s a wheat war,” she says. Natia’s discovery inspired the business with a purpose. “The main goal behind all of this is very specific – to remove Russian wheat from the market. So, we are only using Georgian wheat.”

This focus means that their supply chain has been carefully considered. “We work with people who grow the wheat, who mill the wheat, and then we bake it. It’s a small community who want to [rid] the Georgian market of Russian wheat,” Natia says. “We get our wheat from our friend, Maia Gambashidze, who grows it nearby here in the region. She grows wheat that is mainly endemic Georgian wheat, which is without preservatives or pesticides and is biodynamic.” Flour from Maia’s company, EndeMaia, is also available for sale in the shop.

The endemic nature of this wheat is an important aspect of their offering, because Georgia has a special history with wheat. “When European institutions started to research wheat, its history, where it comes from and how it circles around the globe, they found that the roots kept coming back to Georgia,” Natia explains. “Of 25 wheat varieties found in the world, 15 were in Georgia. And of that 15, five were endemic Georgian wheat.” An endemic variety is one that originates in the country. Because Georgia was forced to stop growing wheat and producing bread commercially when it was a part of the USSR, these varieties have remained largely unaltered. For Natia and her sourdough, this means “we now have very pure and healthy grain.”

Like its floral namesake, Graminea hopes to grow and spread a sustainable transformation of Georgia with each bake. “We depend on importing for everything, and that matters for how the economy develops,” Natia says. “But if we can feed ourselves with Georgian wheat, it’s better. Because when you feed yourself, you feed your future.”

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Published on June 24, 2024

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