My Yahoo!A passion for pasta
How the BARILLA family turned their company into Italy's most successful foodmaker.
Pasta is prosaic food for most people. But to Guido Barilla, pasta is a passion, a quest for perfection, the sum of his life's work--and that of his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather.The 44-year-old chairman of Italy's Barilla Group, together with his brothers Paolo and Luca and his sister Emanuela, grew up playing on the floor of their family's pasta factory near Parma in northern Italy, home of Parmesan cheese, Parma ham and, now, one of the world's biggest milk producers, Parmalat. They watched their father, Pietro, almost lose the 125-year-old company (see box, page 40) then succeed in turning the small, regional business into the most successful pastamaker in Italy, with 41% of the market.
But Guido, an intense man with a mane of dark-brown hair, had bigger ambitions. He attended Boston College in the U.S. "to get away from my overdemanding father" and spent a year in the U.S. selling pasta to specialty stores and Italian restaurants in the 1980s. "I understood that the real future of our company was in the U.S."
The seed of his American ambition germinated a decade later. After a few rough years following their father's death in 1993, Guido and his brothers focused on the lofty goal of making Barilla the most successful food company in Italy. This meant conquering the U.S. market. Guido began exporting Barilla spaghetti and fettucine to America in 1996 and within three years the brand had overtaken Mueller's to become the No. 1 pasta seller in America. Barilla became the first pastamaker to market its products across the entire country and take advantage of the growing number of retailers and food-service companies that prefer nationwide suppliers--Ahold, Wal-Mart, Costco. Barilla now has a 15% share of the $1 billion-a-year U.S. retail pasta market, twice that of its closest branded competitor, Ronzoni.
This achievement is all the more remarkable in that Barilla is a privately held company on the other side of the Atlantic. Barilla, which views every foodmaker as a competitor, is up against Kraft, America's biggest food company. Kraft spends $850 million a year on promotion and advertising--nearly five times Barilla's U.S. sales last year. And then there's the challenge of selling in the U.S. American consumers tend to be price-conscious about food; it's hard to persuade them to pay more even if the quality is better.
Rather than compromise on quality, though, Barilla spent heavily on advertising, especially daytime television to target its biggest customers: housewives. The company spends a full 10% of sales on marketing and advertising. "Too many people think that a ‘poor' product like pasta can't handle big spending on advertising," says Guido.
It also spent a lot on buying shelf space in supermarkets, a common practice in the U.S. To buy shelf space at 80% of the supermarkets there costs at least $1 million per stock item. But money alone isn't enough. Sales staff must visit stores weekly to make sure that Barilla's blue boxes get the block of shelf space that catches shoppers' eyes. Variety helps. "We decided to promote a broad line, not just the spaghetti and elbows that most Americans were used to," says Guido.
For discriminating cooks, there are other ways to influence tastes. Sergio Pereira, the head of marketing in the U.S., courts the food press, sending out batches of pasta with new recipes and inviting writers from the food sections of popular dailies and women's magazines to cooking events. In October, Barilla hosted a feast in New York that explored the role of food in film, art and literature, inviting famous chefs to create new dishes based on the movie Babette's Feast, Norman Rockwell's painting "Freedom from Want" and other famous works.
Barilla also stays close to the cutting edge of new cuisine by courting American and European chefs. "In the U.S. we got started at high-end Italian restaurants where the demand was for a wonderful pasta that can hold up between the kitchen and the table," says Guido. Most restaurants buy their ingredients through the fiercely competitive food-service industry. By getting chefs to demand its pasta, Barilla put food-service middlemen in a position where they had no choice but to offer it.
Sidebars
Spy in the kitchen
Barilla's patrimony
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