I begun baking bread at the age of thirteen, when following my father’s illness I decided to start running the family’s bakery. By nineteen, I had opened a shop in the town centre, then a second, a third one and finally a stand of local products. Then China came along, in 2005. In those years, Italian flour was still a product unknown to the Chinese market and my supplier, Alimonti mill, and I decided to kick-start this adventure. Petali was born: a trading company dealing with food import, the first one to export Italian flour to Beijing and Shanghai. That was just the beginning. A quality product like the Italian flour, which with added taxes and import duties could cost up to four times the local Chinese products, would have had no chance of survival had we overlooked the entire production cycle, from transformation phase to final product. We could absolutely not sell the flour independently of the training courses for staff. And that’s how I begun travelling across China, going from the kitchens of high end hotels in the cities to those of local eateries in far-flung areas, packed with dirt and old machineries. I held training for around fifty people, without knowing a word of neither Chinese nor English, using hand gestures and sometimes an interpreter.
After establishing Petali and the training activity, restaurants came next, closing the ideal circle that goes from the ingredient to the end product served to customers. The first restaurant, Tivoli (in homage to my home town) opened in Shanghai, was our way of bringing to China the flavours of a real Italian restaurants using exclusively high quality Italian products. The same philosophy applied to the second restaurant, Zagara. A partnership with the entrepreneur Roy Cascino from Rome, Zagara was set up within Shanghai Expo 2010: over 8,500 sq feet, one of the only 3 restaurants dedicated to the Made in Italy at the Expo, designed to serve 300 visitors per day.
The partnership with Hohenstaufen (Roy Cascino’s food company) has also led to the bread’s factory, a lab of artisanal bread and Italian patisserie, inspired by the famous “Pizza Cresciuta”, the Easter cake from the Petrini bakery. Together with Roy, we were the first ones to bake panettone in China and distribute it to all the Italian companies in the Country. Today, the bread’s factory employs around 30 people and is in continuous expansion.
My dream is to open up a Tivoli’s Petrini bakery in the far East. It’ll be a challenge, as China is far from the business paradise many Italians imagine – it’s a protectionist country, that resists to foreign companies. Chinese people have their own strong culinary traditions and our products are comparatively expensive. But we have a niche, a defined market, with higher earnings, open to experiment with international cuisine and by focusing on quality products we will have a chance there.
Not sure yet of when, but at some point I’ll go back to Tivoli, probably after having brought in new partners and fully established my companies high levels.
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