Business

From Michelin-star restaurants and a failed business to South Africa’s favourite bakery

Kirsten Minnaar • 1 November 2025

After an unsuccessful restaurant venture, Michael Kalogirou and his two business partners went on to found one of South Africa’s most beloved bakery businesses, Fournos.

Today, the bakery is well-known across Gauteng, but Kalogirou headed up the business when it started in a small store with only two tables and one oven.

Kalogirou was born in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, to Greek immigrant parents. “I had to work for everything I had,” he told CNBC Africa in a 2012 interview.

“My dad was an old-school, hard-working man. Both my parents came here as immigrants, and they tried to make a better life for themselves.”

He attended hotel school in Johannesburg, where he won the Chef of the Year award in 1985, as well as the catering student of the year award.

Kalogirou received a bursary to go to Europe, where he worked in many good hotels and restaurants, including some Michelin-star restaurants, across Italy and France.

When he returned to South Africa, he opened a restaurant in Rosebank with two business partners – a financial partner and a baker.

“The food was great,” he said. “We had a restaurant that was serving up what we called ‘creative cuisine’ and cocktails, and the menu would change on a daily basis.”

“We had a small restaurant that seated about 60 people, and then we had a larger outside area that seated about 120 people, so it was quite a big operation.”

Unfortunately, the restaurant wasn’t the success they were hoping for, and they ended up selling the business.

While late-1980s South Africa may simply not have been ready for their dry-ice cocktails, Kalogirou also attributed the business’s downfall to another problem.

When he came back from Europe, he believed that a restaurant’s success was all about the product being served, and, as a result, this is what he poured all of his focus into.

However, he soon learned that it was the customer, not the product, that really mattered. “When I was at that age, I tended to be a little arrogant, and I thought I knew everything there was to know about food. I learned that I didn’t,” he said.

Fournos Bakery

Fortunately, one of Kalogirou’s business partners was already involved in another business, Fournos, which is a Greek word meaning furnace or oven.

The first Fournos bakery opened in 1989 in Rosebank on Oxford Road. However, during the 1990s, the Hyatt Regency hotel acquired the land that used to be a car park on the street.

Since parking was no longer available, the Fournos store started to take some strain. Fortunately, the business’s financial partner saw an opportunity in Dunkeld.

So, they opened the second Fournos Bakery in the Dunkeld West shopping centre, in Randburg. Although the store was quite small, at only 100 m², it was an instant hit.

In the first month they opened, they had a turnover of about R60,000. They doubled this number during their second month in business, and tripled it the next month.

Eventually, they were able to expand their store into the next-door pizza shop, which closed within six months of them moving there. However, they were still struggling with limited capacity.

“We were almost running 24 hours a day,” Kalogirou said. “We only had one oven, and we had to squeeze in another oven.” Eventually, they also bought a small coffee machine to try and keep customers happy.

“We used to give coffee for free, so that we could keep customers sitting down and having a coffee while they were waiting for product to come out of the oven.”

Kalogirou explained that running the business was incredibly demanding at the start. He would wake up at 2:30 in the morning and drive to town to pick up the bakers in his Ford Laser.

They started baking at 3:30, and the doors opened at around 6:30. Fournous closed at 19:00, and Kalogirou was in bed by 20:30 every night. “For eight months, I didn’t take a day off. It was a hard slog,” he said.

Becoming South Africa’s most beloved bakery

Kalogirou’s hard work paid off, and the business continued to grow and expand across South Africa, becoming one of the country’s most popular bakeries.

As of 2019, Fournos employed 690 employees. Kalogirou’s former restaurant experience, and the lessons he had learned there, were a key part of building Fournos into a successful business.

“If you’re going to open a business, not everything can be planned. A lot of the business evolves, and it evolves because of what customers want and what customers feel,” he said.

“So, listen to your customers, and understand what they’re trying to say to you.” This customer-centric approach is a key reason why the business has grown to its current footprint of 12 stores across Johannesburg and Pretoria.

“We evolved. We listened to our customers. We gave them a deli, because that’s what they wanted. They wanted to sit down and eat – we gave them a restaurant,” Kalogirou said.

“They wanted more. They wanted a health approach to our stores, so we gave them a smoothie bar where we have fresh fruit, and you can make smoothies with them. They wanted catering, we gave them take-home meals and catering.”

Although Kalogirou has since left the business, it continued to win numerous awards throughout the years, and in 2019, it was named South Africa’s most loved local bakery, according to the Santam ‘Most Loved Local’ survey.

In 2025, the three owners of The Grillhouse steakhouse group, Saul Mervis, Marius de la Rey and Peter Williams, acquired the Fournos Group from RMB Corvest.

They promised to inject new life into the business, which, despite struggling to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, still has a lot of growth potential.