The article examines one of the most important directions in the development of the modern food complex in Russia - the formation of a paradigm of import surplus as a fundamentally new direction of a cardinal solution to the problem of food security in the country. Based on the analysis of a large amount of statistical information, the authors give a detailed description of the process of overcoming the dependence of the domestic food market on imports in the post-sanction period. Timely and adequate anti-sanction measures of the Russian government allowed the agricultural sector of the economy to reach a fundamentally new level of development and in five years not only ensure the threshold level of food security for basic products in accordance with the new edition of the Food Doctrine, but also create export potential for grain, sugar and vegetable oil. The production volumes achieved by the domestic agro-industrial complex by 2019 showed that foreign economic sanctions had a rather positive than negative effect on domestic agriculture: over five years, the production of basic crop products increased by 6.8 - 65.6%, livestock products - by 5.0 - 14.7%. The article convincingly substantiates the urgent need to change the paradigm of import substitution to the import substitution paradigm, the distinctive features of which are its complex nature, the focus on solving national projects that, in principle, will change the strategic role of Russia in the international division of labor.