October 16, 2021 - Gastronaut has released the 26th "100 Leading Croatian Restaurants and their Recipes 2021/22". 

The 26th printed and online Croatian and English edition of the book Restaurant Croatica "100 leading Croatian restaurants and their recipes 2021/22", published by Abisal biblioteka Gastronaut, was solemnly promoted at Botel Marina in Rijeka.

The project "100 leading Croatian restaurants - Restaurant Croatica" has been implemented continuously for 26 years and is the oldest national brand of quality in catering.

100 leading Croatian restaurants - Restaurant Croatica is a project to promote quality in the hospitality industry through annual elections and the publication of an accompanying publication. It was initiated in 1995, and the basic idea was to do market research on which restaurants best meet the needs of guests and highlight the leaders to motivate others to improve the quality of offer and service.

In 1995, the survey covered about 700 restaurants, while in 2020 that number climbed to over 2,400 restaurants. Part of the voting was conducted through www.gastronaut.hr, and voters were able to further emphasize the quality of the offer, service, and ambiance. In parallel, the caterers voted with the recommendation of colleagues who are their role models and filled out questionnaires with a detailed description of their offer and service. The final word after reviewing all the materials was given by the Honorary Committee of the project, which announced a new list of 100 leading restaurants presented in the book and guide Restaurant Croatica: "100 leading Croatian restaurants and their recipes 2021/22".

This year, 100 leading Croatian restaurants received Restaurant Croatica plaques and stickers with a QR code that leads to the online edition of the book in Croatian and English, while printed editions can be found at points of sale, or ordered from the publisher via this link.

In the book, restaurants are presented with text, pictures, and recipes of home specialties and information that is worth seeing and experiencing in their surroundings, as well as top products that can be found on the table and destinations with their gastronomic and oenological features.

Among the restaurant's recipes, the new edition of the book also includes stuffed prunes with bacon; gnocchi with smoked skuta cheese; goose liver terrine with blueberry jelly; fried summer strudels; lamb carpaccio; tuna carpaccio and tartar; trganci with sour cream and baked bacon; quiche with goat cheese and dried tomatoes; sea bass fillet in škartoc; squid; lamb tripe; Brač vitalac; beef cheeks in port; lamb chops; venison in wine sauce; salenjaci; chocolate cake made of fresh figs, and more. 

The Restaurant Croatica and Gastronaut projects are the oldest brands of promoting quality in the Croatian hospitality industry, and across 26 years, a total of 497 restaurants were included in Restaurant Croatica, and 6 restaurants defended the title in all 26 years.

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October 16,  2021 - The Croatian Football Cup round of 16 begins later this month with the 16 remaining teams in the competition. 

The Croatian Football Cup is the largest football competition in Croatia, which will soon begin with the round of 16 matches, reports Gol.hr. 

In this phase of the competition, there is no classic draw, but the pairs are determined in such a way that the lower-ranked clubs, according to the cup coefficient, host the stronger ones according to the principle that the weakest host is the strongest (32-1, 31-2, 30- 3, 29-4, 28-5).

The entire SuperSport Croatian Football Cup is played in one game, with a classic draw for the quarterfinals and semifinals, without any winners.

Round of 32

September 14

Nehaj - Gorica 3:7

September 15

Bednja Beletinec - Osijek 0:3

September 21

Pitomaca - Rijeka 0:7
Dugopolje - Lokomotiva 8:9 (after penalties)
Primorac Biograd na Moru - Hajduk 1:2
Vuteks Sloga - Istra 1961 0:3
Mladost Zdralovi - Inter Zapresic 3:1

September 22

Orient 1919 - Dinamo 1:4
Karlovac 1919 - Slaven Belupo 0:2
Međimurje - Šibenik 0:1
Rudar Labin - Split 2:0
Belisce - Jaska Vinogradar Jastrebarsko 4:0
Bjelovar - Rudeš 1:5
Sesvete - Varaždin 2: 3 (after extra time)
BSK Bijelo Brdo - Cibalia 1:0
Zagreb - Oriolik 0:1

Round of 16

October 26

13:00 Rudeš - Osijek
15:00 Belišće - Hajduk
17:30 Sibenik - Slaven Belupo

October 27

15:00 BSK Bijelo Brdo - Dinamo
15:00 Rudar Labin - Istria 1961
15:00 Gorica - Mladost Ždralovi
17:30 Varaždin - Lokomotiva

November 13

14:00 Oriolik Oriovac - Rijeka

The Croatian Cup quarterfinals will be played on December 1, the semifinals on March 2, 2022, and the final on May 26, 2022. 

SuperSport became the title sponsor of the Croatian Football Cup back in September, reports HNS.

The signing ceremony, held at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, was attended by the president of the Croatian Football Federation, Marijan Kustić, executive director of HNS Tomislav Svetina, members of the management board of SuperSport betting Goran Đurić and Radim Haluza, and president of VOX-football and editor-in-chief of HNTV and Ivan Blažičko. In addition to the title sponsorship of the competition, SuperSport will directly financially assist the host clubs in the round of 16 phase of the Cup.

"We thank SuperSport for recognizing the sporting and market value of the Croatian Football Cup. We are pleased that we will have even greater visibility of the competition across the country through television broadcasts and that through this partnership, we will directly help host clubs in organizing the match," said HNS president Marijan Kustić.

"The Croatian Football Cup deserves a title sponsor, and that is why we are looking forward to this cooperation with SuperSport. This is an important step in further commercializing the competition under the auspices of HNS, which confirms the exceptional popularity and potential of Croatian football," said Tomislav Svetina.

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October 16, 2021 - Weddings in Istria can alleviate the seasonality of tourism, strengthen the pre and post-season, and increase the local community's income.

The Istria County Tourist Board organized the first Istria Wedding MeetUp in cooperation with partners - WeddingsInCroatia, StudioBrzak weddings & events, Lepor Weddings, and Flammeum weddings & events - held on October 14 at the Parentium Plava Laguna Hotel in Poreč, reports HRTurizam. 

The event gathered many local experts from the world of weddings, mainly from the Istrian area, and representatives of local tourist boards, which talked about the latest trends and knowledge in this domain.

“The wedding business segment in Istria is growing from year to year. Although neither Croatia nor Istria is recognized as a major wedding destination globally, Istria has managed to profile itself according to the so-called niche segment of weddings, especially in terms of micro or same-sex weddings. Since this is a complex business discipline in which success requires the cooperation of at least a dozen different activities to create a recognizable wedding product eventually, mutual cooperation and togetherness are of key interest in this business. The County Tourist Board has once again confirmed that this product is essential for Istria because, after a fifteen-year process of restructuring and repositioning, a level of quality of accommodation and service that can be compared with similar destinations in the world has been reached. And the recent accession of Istria to the prestigious association Virtuoso opens countless opportunities for all our entrepreneurs in Istria because they have an open channel to a large number of influential travel advisors, more than 22,000, who decide in which direction and which region to support for a wedding product," said the Istria County Tourist Board director Denis Ivošević.

Ivošević also announced three new projects within the wedding segment of Istria: a new stylized thematic photo & video shooting, then bringing world-famous wedding planners to get to know the destination and advertising the Istrian wedding offer in domestic and foreign reference media.

Participants could partake in two panels. The topic of the first panel was weddings as a tourist product and the recognition and branding of Istria as a wedding destination, with Denis Ivošević, sales director of Hotel San Canzian from Buje Suzana Vrtičević Tica, owner of WeddingsInCroatia Iva Kraljevic Licardo, owner of Foto Studio Festival from Labin Rajko Borčić and the agent of the Promotion and Sales Service of the Brijuni National Park Flores Marsetič. Petar Jurica, renowned photographer and owner of the Petar Jurica Weddings agency, Arsen Maršanić, wedding organizer and owner of the Noi Due agency, and Martina Rakić, a wedding planner from the WeddingsInCroatia agency, spoke at the second panel on the topic of trends and new formats and where weddings are going in the future.

In addition to the panel, two lectures were organized, one on the topic of digital marketing, i.e., the impact of online communication on the wedding industry, led by Miško Macolić Tomičić from the MarkeThing agency. The second lecture on the very current topic of organizing sustainable events was given by Maja Bosanac, director of the Eventful agency, who presented the novelties of how events should look with particular attention to the environment.

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ZAGREB, 16 Oct, 2021 - In a comment on protests held outside the homes of members of the national coronavirus crisis management team, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Saturday that such shows were unnecessary as the government was acting responsibly in the coronavirus crisis.

"All those shows... are unnecessary because the government has acted reasonably, responsibly, appropriately and sensitively with regard to all possible segments of state functioning in the 600 days of the pandemic; other countries had months-long lockdowns," the PM said after a conference on agriculture, fisheries and forestry in Zagreb.

Noting that in Croatia there was a ban only on large gatherings and the work of night clubs, Plenković said that the protests did not seem rational, speculating if their real purpose was to generate social unrest.

About a dozen citizens gathered outside Health Minister Vili Beroš's home on Thursday evening after a Religious Instruction teacher from Križevci called on them to do so on his Facebook profile due to restrictions on visits to hospitalised children.

Beroš said that he understood their dissatisfaction, but that the place for dealing with such matters should be the Health Ministry.

Another group of protesters on Friday protested outside the home of the head of Zagreb's Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Alemka Markotić.

Asked if the situation could escalate and if members of the coronavirus crisis management team were under police protection since more protests had been announced, Plenković said that as far as he was aware, they were not.

Should someone resort to violence, they will be given police protection, he said, recalling that until the October 2020 terrorist attack "we had been very easy to approach."

"We are a normal, small Central European and Mediterranean country, civilised, warm, and we are good hosts... There are, on occasion, violent individuals but the Croatian people in general are not violent. These are exceptions. I call on them to calm down and be reasonable, there is no reason for drama, there are much worse situations than this," he said.

Asked about a possible parliamentary vote of no confidence in Finance Minister Zdravko Marić, Plenković said that no opposition motion questioning the government's work had been successful so far and neither would the latest one.

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ZAGREB, 16 Oct, 2021 - Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Saturday that his cabinet would not allow a decline in the living standards of the Croatians due to the energy prices, now when the funds for the post-coronacrisis recovery were secured.

Visiting the agriculture ministry's fair promoting the Croatian farming sector in Zagreb, PM Plenković reassured the general public that in the event of a further rise of the energy crunch prices, there were additional tools available to his government  to use them to calibrate the prices in the country.

He underscored that the internal discussions in the government and also their talks with international partners over the last two months had been focused on the energy prices, including the trends in prices of electricity and natural gas.

Regarding the prices of gas supplies and electricity, Plenković said that "the situation is stable in Croatia" and that the country "is in a much better position than many others."

Concerning petroleum products, since 2014, fuel prices in the country have been fully defined by the market, he recalled.

Until the latest developments considering the fuel prices globally, the government had never applied Article 9 of the Law on Petroleum Products that envisages the adoption of a decree on capping the prices, Plenković said.

That article stipulates that only in exceptional circumstances, the government can determine the maximum retail prices of fuels for a period no longer than 90 days in order to protect consumers or for some other justified reasons.

On 14 October, the government passed a decree limiting the retail price of petrol to HRK 11.10 (€1.48) per litre and the price of diesel to HRK 11.00 (€1.46) per litre for the next 30 days.

Plenković today explained that the government had opted for that interventionist move when it found that the conditions were met.

"We managed to overcome the biggest health, economic and financial crisis and consequently avoided the potential biggest social crisis in the last 600 days, without large-scale lay-offs and without a series of bankruptcies and social fractures, while all the state services continued to  function as usually, and we managed to retain the country's investment rating and good reputation  on the domestic and international financial markets, with a clear roadmap for Croatia's accession to the euro area. Therefore, we will not let  a decline in the living standards of our citizens due to the energy  prices, now when we managed to ensure funds for the economic recovery," Plenković said.

Describing the government's response to the energy crunch prices as agile and prompt, he added that in the event of the escalation, his cabinet had additional tools at its disposal to address the situation.

He said that he expected energy producers and distributors to assume a part of the burden. "I believe that they are sensible. They are not the companies that cannot endure such burden on their margins and or that it would adversely affect their business," he said.

He added that the government would follow the developments in the period to come and that the next moves would be considered in three week's time before the expiry of the current 30-day price limiting.

Asked by the press about aid to agricultural producers faced with high fuel prices, Minister Marija Vučković recalled that farmers and fishermen could use the so-called blue-dyed fuels that have the government-subsided prices.

The minister said that the authorities were taking other measures to help the whole sector to be more competitive.

Use of blue-dyed diesel in 2020 approved for 97,200 farmers

In January 2020, the Paying Agency for Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development granted 97,200 farmers the right to use blue-dyed diesel in 2020 in the total amount of 173.1 million liters, .

The farmers could use cards with allocated amounts of blue-dyed diesel as of early January last year.

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October the 16th, 2021 - The Croatian Modepack company's products are being purchased and used by some of the world's giants, including the likes of Amazon, Adidas and DHL.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, the growth of e-commerce over recent years hasn't particularly surprised anyone, but there are almost no analysts or companies operating in this sector who could have predicted the sheer volume of growth in this segment of trade due to the global COVID-19 pandemic and the speed of change in the entire sales and delivery chain, which completely altered in just a few months.

This was the general conclusion at the world's largest e-commerce show and its accompanying logistics, Deliver 2021, which was held last week in the Dutch city of Amsterdam.

Customer expectations have grown

The coronavirus crisis which has turned the world on its head over the last year and a half has completely flipped global society and the economy upside down as well. While it has brought to problems to the doors of some from which could take years to recover from, to others it has brought double-digit growth and changes and modernisation that would otherwise require several years to occur. The e-commerce sector and related logistics services are just one of those sectors that has grown by more than 100 percent on the wings of the problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

How we can deal with such unexpected and rapid growth, adapt to new social and economic circumstances, and especially meet the changed and increased expectations of customers in terms of quality and security of delivery, prices and especially deadlines, was the central theme of Deliver.

The fair had been takin place in a digital edition from October the 4th to the 15th, and culminated in its classic form late last week in Amsterdam. Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, Nike, Unilever, Samsung, Ikea, DPD, GLS, DHL, Overseas and the largest European post offices were just some of about 1,000 companies that found themselves involved with Deliver.

Along with many other great giants of this sector, the small Croatian Modepack company, which in recent years has grown into one of the global players in the production of delivery and safety packaging, was also present. The Croatian Modepack company's products are purchased by customers in 32 countries around the world.

Jure Siric, the director and owner of Modepack, which exports 92 percent of its sales, pointed out that this is their first appearance at the Deliver fair, and their impressions and expectations are optimistic. "Over recent years, we've achieved great growth, especially in terms of exports, and last year we recognizsd the need to be present at events like this.

Unfortunately, last year, COVID-19 stopped all activities and this fair was also postponed, so now we definitely wanted to perform. The registration fee is quite high for Croatian wallets, but if you want to be in the company of the big names, then you have to invest,'' Siric stated while in Amsterdam.

He added that although he has the impression that the fair will bring them a lot in terms of new contracts and revenue growth, it's difficult to quantify for now. "According to the programme, we had about 20 official and pre-arranged B2B meetings, kind of like dates, where we were limited to 25 minutes per conversation. Significantly, we asked for a meeting with half of the companies, and half of them then chose us.

The conversations were interesting, some of them detailed, but of course in such places contracts aren't signed, only information is collected. We expect that in the coming period, after the evaluation of data in specific companies, there will be concrete offers and talks about contracts,'' explained Siric, whose team in Amsterdam included the Croatian Modepack company's head of marketing and web sales, Nemanja Suka.

The duo from Modepack pointed out that there were no big surprises for them in terms of the focus of experts and entrepreneurs at Deliver's event, nor were there any shocks in terms of the topics of conversation with potential partners because the trends and challenges are similar for all participants working within the e-commerce and delivery chain.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the closures and lockdowns that followed in many countries, including the one last spring in Croatia, had a major impact on changing consumer habits, and thus on the entire supply chain.

In addition to the enormous growth in the volume of e-commerce, a lot of emphasis has been placed on security, ie the fear of being infected by the virus and the sheer speed of its spread, meaning that many customers had been looking for delivery on the same day. Although this model existed in some form even before the pandemic, Last Mile Delivery, ie the fast delivery of smaller quantities of goods and at a shorter distance within a time frame measured in just hours, became an entire e-commerce sector with its own rules and principles.

As Mick Jone, Zancargo’s strategic supply chain consultant, pointed out in Amsterdam, after more than a year of growth that was accelerated by COVID-19, e-commerce itself is evolving rapidly.

“At a time when consumer expectations, habits and priorities have changed, there's a stronger argument for supply chain redesign than ever before. Because of all this, it is very important to make a decision on how to adapt the incoming logistics to service users in this new, hypercompetitive retail environment,'' explained Jone.

Jennifer Nelen, a partner at the Dutch subsidiary of consulting firm PwC, stressed that our new world, now more than ever, requires collaboration within the retail, e-commerce and logistics industries to successfully respond to market shifts and disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Statistics say that in Europe alone, the number of customers in the e-commerce channel increased by an incredible 15 million last year, and the growth trend at a rate between 15 and 20 percent is expected to continue in the coming period. In concrete figures, this means that last year the e-commerce segment generated 8.3 billion euros more than the year before.

It is expected that by 2025, this segment should generate growth of 15.7 billion euros more than last year. It is still a significant problem that most customers, especially those over the age of 55, even if they have the basic IT skills to do e-commerce, still insist on “feeling and seeing'' the product before buying it. The coronavirus pandemic has partially reduced this trend, but it's still present.

The British giant Tesco presented its experiences with large European retail chains at Deliver, and its representatives pointed out that the opening of physical stores has greatly reduced their demand in the e-commerce channel because the same customers have adapted to the situation in accordance with the United Kingdom's epidemiological regulations.

In addition to the above-mentioned customer requirements and the focus of the entire e-commerce system, there is an increasingly strong focus on ecology. This specifically means that recycled, or recyclable, packaging has become something that every retailer must offer today.

The Croatian Modepack company itself, which has Amazon, H&M, Vans, Adidas, DHL, DPD, Loomis, numerous European financial institutions as well as the diamond exchange in Antwerp (Antwerpen World Diamond Center) and a number of others in its customer portfolio, is also very much on the wings of e-volume growth. Its stores recorded a steady increase in revenue, which amounted to 50 million kuna last year, which is a growth of 60 percent compared to the year before when they grew by 30 percent.

For this year, they expect an additional growth of 20 percent and revenue of about 60 million kuna. Therefore, they decided to invest 50 million kuna in their new plant in Velika Gorica near Zagreb, which should be completed in the middle of next year, and which will allow them to double their capacity, which currently stands at around 200 million pieces of various packaging.

With the new plant and the expansion of the range, they expect that in 2025, their revenue should reach 150 million kuna, with a tendency for further growth.

"Global e-commerce is growing unstoppably, and even before the pandemic, back in 2019, global growth was 21 percent. Data for last year shows that countries with more developed e-commerce systems achieved significant, but still lower growth, while others, like Croatia, measured growth in the hundreds of percent.

The statistics we have show that e-commerce at the EU level increased by 31 percent last year, and if we look at some of the most important countries then we see that in Germany it is 22 percent, in the United Kingdom 31 percent, and in Spain 75 percent. Estimates for Croatia are over 200 percent,'' stated Jure Siric.

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October the 16th, 2021 - Gabrijela Korica is a promoter of the application of machine learning technologies in healthcare at Microsoft Croatia, and she recently launched a luxury furniture brand for pets called Gambarossa. But that isn't call, this new Croatian pet furniture brand comes with a heart in the form of donations to those animals most in need.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Lucija Spiljak writes, last year, Gabrijela and her sister Petra launched the first children’s book on artificial intelligence in English, and Gambarossa is the latest venture of this enterprising woman from the world of IT.

When, she says, she couldn't find the ideal sort of bed for her eleven-year-old pug Diva's birthday, she spontaneously began the process of sketching and designing a bed for her beloved dog, and then an idea for Croatian pet furniture hit her.

“Through these sketches, it ended up being the case that her bed would need to be a more complex, larger bed, and through brand research, I concluded that I could try to offer something new, enjoy the process, and help others out.

I thought about the project for quite a while, I showed the sketch and the idea to someone who had faith in me and decided to turn my vision into reality. I'm just an idea designer, and he took care of everything, opened a company and turned the idea into reality,'' Gabrijela Korica explained.

This Croatian pet furniture brand also has, as noted above, a humanitarian note - for each piece of furniture they donate 1,000 kuna to various Croatian animal protection associations, working to provide funding for animals, from accommodation and food to veterinary and other medical costs.

Although the market for luxury dog ​​furniture in Croatia is slightly smaller, Gabrijela says that owners around the world want to set aside a certain amount for their pets.

The name of the Gambarossa brand is a modification of her mother's surname, hence the inspiration. She procures materials for the production in Turkey, where this Croatian pet furniture is produced, but says that she would like to move the procurement of materials and the production of furniture to Croatia in the long run.

She wants to further expand her offer, start with employment, but also attract as many people as possible who would support her Gambarossa brand in order to, among other things, help animals as well.

"There's great interest from our customers, mostly from other countries, but we're certainly happy that they have given us their vote as new Croatian brand and thus support the Croatian economy," concluded Gabrijela Korica.

For more, make sure to check out our dedicated Made in Croatia section.

October the 16th, 2021 - The situation with the Banovina post-earthquake reconstruction process isn't particularly positive. This likely comes as no real surprise to those of us living in Zagreb, where certain areas still look as if the earthquake of March 2020 happened far more recently than it did.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, it was said on Wednesday at a round table called ''the reconstruction and development of Banovina'' that things with the Banovina post-earthquake reconstrction process weren't going quickly enough, but that it all can be fixed.

The round table on the matter was organised by the Office of the President of the Republic of Croatia, Zoran Milanovic, and according to Velibor Mackic, the president's special adviser for the economy, it's necessary to separate reconstruction and development when it comes to this Central Croatian area which was struck by a devastating earthquake at the very end of last year.

"Representatives of the EBRD said that the funds for this are available, but that they're waiting for infrastructure projects," said Mackic, and warned that the development part of this process "remained in the lurch."

Those present agreed that all previous projects related to Banovina are applicable within the existing law. Asked if bottlenecks have been located in in the area, which is why the reconstruction process is taking so long, he answered that bottlenecks aren't something that should come as a surprise to anyone.

According to him, it is crucial to manage the development of the area during the Banovina post-earthquake reconstruction process, and has called for rapid public sector intervention.

"It's necessary for some things to be settled, and we believe that the state can help: from settling the situation in the process of reconstruction, and to speed it up. It's necessary to enter that space regardless of the disorder of ownership relations,'' said Mackic.

Along with the President of the Republic of Croatia, Zoran Milanovic, the round table was attended by representatives of the World Bank Office in Croatia, HAZU, EBRD, and HUP.

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