Arthur Green Net Worth

Biography of Arthur Zeleny

Arthur Eduardovich Zeleny is an entrepreneur from Moscow, founder of the Performance Group, a group of companies for the delivery of portioned meals. His holding, which includes brands such as Performance Food, Level Kitchen, My Food and Easy Meal, controls 25% of the entire healthy food delivery market in Russia.

Childhood and youth

Artur Eduardovich Zeleny was born on March 18, 1991 in a wealthy Moscow family. He spent his childhood years in the South-West of the capital. Parents were engaged in business, and Zeleny had time and opportunity to organize his leisure time. From an early age, the future entrepreneur was involved in extreme sports: he preferred motocross on ATVs – cross-country endurance racing.

Another passion of young Arthur was cooking – starting with the simplest dishes like an omelet, at the age of 10, Zeleny was preparing cutlets, chops and pies for his parents and brother.

At that time, Zeleny’s hobbies had no effect on his choice of profession. He studied at an ordinary Moscow school. In high school, while preparing for the competition, he broke his leg, as a result of which he spent a month and a half in a cast. During this time, I studied the school curriculum for a year and passed all the exams perfectly. He passed the senior classes as an external student.

In 2008 he entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of World Politics. Specialty – international relations. Almost immediately I realized that the diplomatic service did not attract him, and concentrated his efforts on what began to work out from the very beginning – entrepreneurial activity.

Entrepreneurial career

Artur Zeleny always drew business ideas from his hobbies and life situations. So, he opened the very first case as a 14-year-old teenager in connection with the same motocross. Green, together with a friend, launched a motorcycle and ATV tuning studio. It cannot be said that the business brought a lot of money to its creator. Nevertheless, he inspired Zeleny with self-confidence – the guy realized that with motivation and effort, you can make money on what you like, and not on what you are forced to do.

As a result, in his student years, a novice businessman was engaged in the development of online stores selling household appliances and electronics. Zeleny’s idea was that he did not purchase the equipment himself – it was in the warehouses of wholesalers, and when the online store received an order, it was sent directly to the client. This allowed the business to operate with minimal investment, but bring good profits.

The next step in the career of an entrepreneur was the foundation of his training center. He named it the European School of Art. This name was given to him for a reason – a distinctive feature of the Green courses was the orientation towards the practical part of the classes. Students did not start with theory, but immediately with “field studies”, and after developing the basic skills they approached theoretical studies – just as they do in courses in European schools. The training center worked at the Winzavod, and specialists in creative professions were trained there – photographers, florists, designers and even cameramen. The school also held master classes and held exhibitions.

As Zeleny himself recalled, the school was his first serious undertaking, which brought him start-up capital for a new business – now associated with his school hobby – cooking.

Artur Zeleny is the owner of Performance Group

In 2015, the entrepreneur was actively involved in boxing and needed to lose weight in order to compete. Since the work took a lot of time, Zeleny decided to look for a subscription food service for himself – so that ready-made meals would be brought to him, and someone else would think about cooking and calories. But there was no suitable delivery service: in those days, no one was engaged in fine-tuning for the client, and the existing services provided only basic services.

As a result, Artur Zeleny got the idea to make his service especially for those who, on the one hand, did not want to deny themselves delicious food, and on the other hand, wanted to achieve some goals in their physical form or could not eat certain types of dishes for health reasons. or religious reasons. This is how Performance Food appeared – one of the first subscription services in Russia for the delivery of healthy food. The first subscriber was the businessman himself, who invested in his startup almost everything that he had at that time – about 70 million rubles.

Zeleny immediately began an aggressive expansion in the market, sparing no expense for its own production and for developing the competitive advantages of its service. One of the first from Performance Food was the possibility of free delivery not only in Moscow, but also in the nearest suburbs. Further – more: the Green brand introduced free consultations of nutritionists, the possibility of suspending a subscription without penalties. A completely new menu was developed: a brand chef was invited, and restaurant-level dishes and molecular cuisine appeared in deliveries. Performance Food became a premium brand whose customers could easily get for lunch, for example, gourmet pasta with truffles.

To grow further, new audiences were needed. Then Zeleny’s team decided to segment the market by identifying several new brands that would simultaneously compete with each other and position themselves differently. This is how the second service appeared – Level Kitchen, which the businessman opened together with the famous bodybuilder Denis Gusev, who became the face of the new brand. Initially, Level Kitchen was completely focused on people who were actively involved in sports.

To manage these companies, Zeleny created the Performance Group holding, located in Moscow. According to Infoline agency estimates, in 2018 Zeleny companies ranked second in Russia in terms of revenue in their segment and approximately a quarter of the entire domestic portioned food delivery market.

Finally, in 2019, the third link appeared in the line – the My Food company, which, unlike the others, was positioned as “delicious food for everyone”, and was focused primarily on a variety of menus and exclusive dishes from all over the world.

Personal life

Zeleny Arthur Eduardovich married in 2013 his beloved girl, whom he had been dating for three years. He met her on a trip abroad to France, and spent their honeymoon in Mexico.

The couple has two children – a boy and a girl. The birth of children had a great influence on the worldview of A. Zeleny. Family is his most valuable and most desired asset.

Among the businessman’s hobbies are mainly outdoor activities and professional sports: motocross, Greco-Roman wrestling, bodybuilding and boxing. From time to time he likes to go snowboarding and skiing.

Arthur Green now

At the moment, the Zeleny holding employs almost 1,500 people, and couriers deliver meals to customers in four cities – Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar and Yekaterinburg.

The company has seven of its own production centers, the last of which opened at the end of 2019 in the capital and became the largest in Russia: 5,000 square meters and 100,000 servings per day. The group produces more than a million dishes every month.

Last year, Mail Ru acquired a stake in the Performance Group. Green sees the deal as a good chance to expand its presence in the markets. In order for the entrepreneur to push out his competitors and get up to half of the entire healthy food market by the end of 2024.

Among the latest news – against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, Arthur Zeleny instructed to temporarily seal the company’s products in plastic bags. “Despite the fact that the food itself, as well as cutlery, is hermetically packed at the factory, we decided to take additional measures to ensure the safety of transportation. This will almost completely eliminate the contact of the contents of each package with the external environment,” Arthur Zeleny said in an interview.