How Yerkin Tatishev and Kusto Group Are Filling an Unexpected Gap With Kazakhstan’s First Pet Food Factory

Not every landmark investment from Yerkin Tatishev and Kusto Group arrives with a skyline-changing tower or a red-carpet ceremony. Some announce themselves more quietly — a new facility in an industrial zone, a product category that a whole country has always imported and never made for itself. The launch of KazPetFood, set to begin operations in the second half of 2026 at the Alatau Special Economic Zone near Almaty, belongs firmly in that second category. It is Kazakhstan’s first dedicated large-scale pet food factory, and it fills a gap that most people never noticed until the shelves started emptying. Behind it are Yerkin Tatishev, Founder and Chairman of Kusto Group, and the KazPetFood team building the plant from the ground up.

A pet food factory might read like an outlier in a portfolio known for grain, construction materials, and logistics. Look a little closer, though, and it turns out to follow the same investment logic Kusto Group has applied everywhere else: commit patient capital to a structural gap, build something durable, and let the returns follow the quality.

A Gap Hiding in Plain Sight 

For years, almost every bag of dry dog and cat food sold in Kazakhstan came from somewhere else. The country has a large and fast-growing community of pet owners, a pet care market estimated to be worth somewhere between eighty and a hundred million dollars, and — until now — virtually no domestic production at scale.

That arrangement worked until it didn’t. Beginning in 2022, rising logistics costs and disrupted supply chains started to bite. Imported brands that once reached Kazakhstan easily suddenly had to cross additional borders to get there. Prices climbed sharply — for some popular imported lines, retail costs rose by well over half. A number of premium brands quietly vanished from store shelves altogether, priced out of a market that still wanted them.

Yerkin Tatishev and Kusto Group saw in that disruption something more than a temporary inconvenience. They saw a structural gap — a genuine, durable need that domestic production could meet, and an investment thesis with years of runway ahead of it. The decision to commit capital to a local factory was made in 2023, in direct response to a market that had been turned upside down. It is a familiar pattern for anyone who has watched how Kusto Group invests: find the place where a country depends on outsiders for something essential, then put real money behind the thing that closes that gap.

What KazPetFood Will Actually Produce 

The plant itself is built to serious specifications. In its initial phase, KazPetFood is projected to produce roughly 40,000 tons of high-quality dry food for dogs and cats every year, running on state-of-the-art European equipment. That capacity is designed to serve not only the Kazakh market but the wider Central Asian region and export destinations beyond it.

Just as important as the output is what goes into it. The factory is set up to draw on domestic raw materials wherever possible, which means the benefit doesn’t stop at the factory gate. Local grain producers, protein suppliers, and packaging firms all stand to gain from a steady new customer operating at scale. A single facility becomes an anchor for a supply chain that mostly didn’t exist before.

For Kazakhstan, the significance is straightforward. A category that has been served almost entirely by imports will finally have a large domestic producer. That means new jobs, reduced dependency on foreign suppliers in a growing market, and greater resilience the next time global logistics get complicated. For Kusto Group, it’s a chance to build something durable in a category with room to grow for years.

Why a Grain-and-Logistics Company Is Making Pet Food 

It’s a fair question. Kusto Group is best known for agriculture, building materials, real estate, and logistics across nine countries. Pet food sits a little outside that map. But the connective tissue is the company’s agricultural base — the same grain and protein operations that have made Kusto a serious player in Kazakh farming feed naturally into pet nutrition.

KazPetFood isn’t starting entirely from scratch, either. The company has prior experience in the category, having previously handled smaller-scale production aimed at kennels and specialist breeders. The new plant is a leap in scale rather than a leap into the unknown — taking existing know-how and building the industrial capacity to match a national-sized opportunity.

That progression is characteristic of how Yerkin Tatishev tends to approach new ventures. Rather than chasing whatever category happens to be fashionable, Kusto Group looks for gaps it is genuinely positioned to fill, then commits the capital and patience to fill them properly. A pet food factory rooted in the company’s own agricultural strengths is a textbook example.

More Than a Factory: Backing the Kazakh Tazy 

There’s a cultural thread to this story that’s easy to miss in the production figures. Alongside the commercial project, KazPetFood has lent its support to the international recognition of the Kazakh Tazy — an ancient sighthound breed woven deeply into the country’s nomadic heritage.

It’s a small detail, but a telling one. Yerkin Tatishev has spoken consistently about the importance of pursuing economic progress without discarding cultural heritage along the way. Championing a native Kazakh breed while building a modern pet food industry to serve the country’s animals is the kind of gesture that connects the two — commerce and culture reinforcing each other rather than pulling in opposite directions.

Anyone familiar with Kusto Group’s wider record will recognize the instinct. The company has long treated its involvement in a country as something broader than a set of transactions, pairing industrial investment with support for cultural and social initiatives. The Tazy connection is a modest but genuine extension of that philosophy into an unexpected corner.

Part of Kusto Group’s Biggest Investment Year Yet 

KazPetFood isn’t arriving in isolation. It lands in what has been one of the busiest and most capital-intensive years in Kusto Group’s two-decade history — a stretch in which the group has committed serious money across several sectors at once.

The scale is easy to see once the individual investments are lined up. In logistics, Kusto Group is putting roughly 28 billion tenge into a new complex in the Almaty region and has budgeted around $30 million for a dedicated cargo airline, aimed squarely at reducing Kazakhstan’s reliance on foreign carriers. In agriculture, sustained investment in storage infrastructure and logistics coordination paid off in record grain export volumes into Asian markets in 2025. In real estate, Kusto Home is building the Diamond residential development in Almaty — deliberately lower-density and higher-quality than the market norm, on the conviction that building something genuinely good is where the returns come from. The group has also moved toward an IPO of its Israeli coatings business, Tambour, opening the door to public capital.

Set against that backdrop, the KazPetFood investment fits a clear pattern. Whether the capital is going into grain heading to Asian buyers, logistics that reduces reliance on foreign carriers, housing built to last, or dog and cat food that no longer has to be shipped across multiple borders, the underlying thesis is consistent: invest where Kazakhstan depends on others, and build domestic capacity to change that. Yerkin Tatishev has described this in terms of load-bearing investment — the unglamorous foundations that make an economy function. A pet food plant may not sound load-bearing, but for a market that had no domestic production at all, that’s exactly what it is.

What This Investment Reveals About Kusto Group’s Approach 

Zoom out, and KazPetFood tells you a lot about how Yerkin Tatishev and Kusto Group think about investment.

There’s the willingness to deploy capital into a category others have avoided, precisely because the gap is real and no one else has invested to fill it at scale. There’s the emphasis on local sourcing and local employment, so the return on the investment spreads well beyond the balance sheet. There’s the clear preference for patient, long-horizon investing over chasing a quick exit, and the instinct to pair a commercial bet with something of cultural meaning.

Yerkin Tatishev has spoken often about building businesses that are structurally sound and genuinely valuable to the communities they operate in — the kind of investing where financial return and national benefit point in the same direction. A factory that gives Kazakhstan its own pet food industry, creating jobs, strengthening domestic supply chains, and reducing dependency on imports in a growing market, is a clear expression of what that philosophy looks like when capital actually gets committed.

In a region where it’s often easier to keep importing than to invest in building, that kind of long-term investment stands out. And like the best of what Kusto Group backs, it’s designed to last.