Five steps, and the parts most suppliers leave out.
We are an Italian formulation company that manufactures in the United States. This is what that actually means, step by step — including the places where the honest answer is less flattering than the marketing one.
- 01
We buy where the goods already are
About nine out of every ten dollars we spend on raw materials goes to suppliers holding stock inside the United States. That does not mean every ingredient is born here — our hazelnuts are Turkish, our amarena cherries come from Europe — it means that when you need it, it is already in the country.
That is the difference between reordering and importing. Sugar reordered sixteen times in five months. Pistachio every four to six weeks. A warehouse that turns, instead of dead stock held to cover a crossing.
- 02
Every raw material has a name, a supplier and a current cost
Of nearly every raw material that enters the plant we know who sold it to us, when, and what it costs today — not last year's price list. When goods arrive from abroad, freight is allocated kilo by kilo, so the cost we see is the real landed cost.
It sounds like bookkeeping. It is the reason we can quote your product at your volume instead of at ours, and the reason a reformulation is a decision instead of a guess.
- 03
A formulation is a document that adds up
Every product we make is a written formulation: ingredient list, percentage of the whole, package weight. All sixty-three formulations in production in the United States close at exactly 100% net of packaging. The average one has about nine ingredients — the simplest has two, the most involved fifteen.
A recipe written in percentages is the only kind that scales: the same formula holds for a ten-kilo trial and for a production run, and it can be compared against another formula. A recipe in grams, the way it came out that day, is neither reproducible nor transferable to a second operator.
- 04
The nut arrives whole. The paste is our work
The pistachio arrives shelled, every four to six weeks. The hazelnut arrives Turkish and blanched, in 25-kilo sacks. From there it is our work: the paste, the whole grain, the fine grain, the variegate, the coating, the spread.
Our hazelnut paste is hazelnut: 1,000 grams of hazelnut per kilo of product. No added oil, no sugar, no flavoring. Our pistachio paste is 99.5% pistachio — 995 g of pistachio, 3 g of salt, 2 g of spirulina, an algae, for colour. Nothing else.
The hazelnut paste is also an ingredient in four of our other products. In our Gianduia Torino it is 40% of the weight.
Pistachio, from whole kernel to paste — in our plant.
- 05
Two cocoas, and the fats said in full
In the chocolate lines we use two different cocoas: a 22-24% and a black alkalised one. They do different jobs — one carries flavour, the other colour and depth — and keeping them separate costs more than buying one.
On fats we would rather be complete than flattering. In our nut pastes the fat is the fruit itself, and nothing is added. In the coatings fat is nearly half the product: there we use coconut oil, and in some references a share of palm oil. Sunflower oil and sunflower lecithin run through much of the range.
The full composition is on the specification sheet of every product. We would rather tell you first than have you find out.
Two things we will not claim. We do not promise a delivery time in days: buying often is not the same as shipping fast, and we would rather say nothing than quote a number we have not measured. And we do not claim total traceability — for a small number of materials the supplier record is still incomplete, and we are closing that gap rather than rounding it up.
Bring us a product you already make.
Send us the formula, or a sample of something you want matched. We work backwards from yours, not from our catalog.