Cyprus isn’t just eating more delivery, it’s outsourcing cooking.

In this episode of Made in Cyprus, we sit down with Yiannis Hadjiconstantouras, a marketer-turned-serial food entrepreneur behind Marinato, Flipstreet, and Makai, to unpack what it really takes to win in the food business. An industry where margins are tight, competition is brutal, and “good food” is only the entry ticket.

We talk about building multi-brand kitchens during COVID, why most new food concepts don’t survive past the first hype wave, and the four numbers Yiannis obsesses over daily (reviews, food cost, staff cost, sales). He also shares why service recovery is a brand superpower, why “ghost kitchens are history,” and what it will take to turn a Cyprus-born operation into a franchised chain.

Brought to you by Factory39 and Martin Zarian.

It’s not on tv, it’s not on the radio, and it’s rarely on podcasts, but in reality, it’s everywhere.

In this episode of Made in Cyprus, we sit down with Despo Pavlou for a conversation Cyprus still treats like a taboo: LGBTQ+ visibility, rights, and what it actually feels like to grow up believing you’re alone. Despo shares her journey from the Cyprus Diaspora in South Africa, to suppressing her identity for decades, to coming out, rebuilding, and turning trauma into a story that helps others feel seen.

We talk family, faith, and why religion and politics should never decide who gets to love who. We also get into her book "My Kind of Normal", why representation matters, and what has to change in Cyprus - from policy, to culture, to the everyday way people speak about "normal".

Brought to you by Factory39 and Martin Zarian.

Short-term rentals host new guests every day, but very few people understand the chaos behind getting each property ready, on time, every time.

In this episode of Made in Cyprus, we speak with Nicolas Chrysostomou, founder of Piney, a company scaling across Europe by turning short-term rental operations into a tech-driven logistics engine. Nicolas shares the lessons from launching Bolt in Cyprus, surviving COVID when revenue hit zero overnight, and why building from Cyprus is powerful… but can’t be your only test.

We get into why Piney isn’t just “a cleaning company,” how the team built the technology first, and what changes when you operate across Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, and Paris, where infrastructure and logistics rewrite the rules.

Brought to you by Factory 39 and Martin Zarian.