We welcomed Leonardo Bagnoli, president of Sammontana Holding, to our interview box in the Italian Pavilion at Summer Fancy Food to talk about the history and new projects of one of the most iconic Italian ice cream brands ever.
The American market is a challenging one, very rich in offerings, but with a weakness for made in Italy. What does it mean to bring Italian style to the American consumer?
We are a family business that for 80 years has been dedicated to the production of ice cream and other products, for breakfast or frozen cakes. We made the big leap in 1960, when my uncles and father decided to “get out” of my grandfather’s bar store where they were dedicated to ice cream production and make it more modern.
They decided to go looking for machinery, which the Americans were said to have left after the war in a warehouse in Genoa. Having found these American machines, they returned to Empoli to start more industrial ice cream production. And that’s how the company started, with a somewhat American soul but with the know-how of us Italians.
Being here, in the United States, is a bit of a historical return because we brought back that Italian ice cream, very Italian, but made with those American machine parts to the place where those machines started.
Now starts a new story, starts a new chapter full of challenges, of the desire to enter this market, to make oneself known and certainly anyway the Fancy Food represents a springboard, a very important platform of visibility, clearly there is always a part of risk that a product goes a little bit to immerse itself in a mix of other products, of other Italian excellence, however from this point of view
What is your strategy to consolidate your presence in the U.S. market, to build lasting ties with buyers, with importers, with distributors?
We have studied the market, we have done tests with American consumers who have rated the product very positively, different from what they usually find. We have clues that give us hope, it is clear that then the consumer will decide whether to try the product and especially whether to repurchase it. We want to do things right and we want to be a stable presence in this market, of course we want to sell a product that is Made in Italy, so it will be transported from Italy all the way here and we want to do things slowly, with the right steps to consolidate the product and to be more and more present in that premium price market niche that we compete in.
What do you see as the main challenges that need to be addressed and what, if any, specific approach would you like to take?
Just over a year ago we made an important acquisition, Bindi and Fornodasolo. Especially Bindi has a historical presence here in the United States, and so the distribution that Bindi has developed over all these years will be the basis for being able to develop the success of the Sammontana product as well. One of the challenges is just knowing how to take advantage of this distribution, knowing how to take advantage of the sales force present in the United States of this company that we are now integrating with Sammontana to have that distribution capacity, that ability to make the product available to our consumer that is the key to success.
The article Sammontana, Bagnoli: “Our story representing Italian-ness but with American elements” comes from TheNewyorker.
