First draft: 22 March 2016, last updated 12 December 2024
I have spoken at length about the problems of catering in Italy: it is food mania but more than 5,000 public establishments are in the hands of mafias.
I speak about it having also owned a restaurant for three years in Milan.
From the FIPE (Federazione Italia Pubblici Esercizi) website, 5 February 2016:
“The restaurant industry gains 0.3 percentage points
Like every year, Istat, in order to take into account the changes that have emerged in the spending habits of families, revises the list of products that make up the reference basket of consumer prices.
The weight for 2016 of food services is 8.9 per cent, when it was 8.6 per cent in 2015′.
It is not clear whether the weight of catering grows by 0.3% or by 3.3% as indicated on the same site, at the same point….
In any case, this is pure theory, conjecture, given the high incidence of black within the sector (*).
Catering probably weighs well over 10% of Italian GDP.
(*) FIPE, in the Corriere Economia of 21 March, stated that the catering industry in Italy is worth 76 billion €, but these are certainly estimates.
And it is not clear whether they take into account the widespread phenomenon of the black economy…
The Chamber of Commerce data published on 14 March in Corriere della Sera are, in contrast to the Istat data, very clear
Public establishments, from 2013 to 2015, grew by 28%
and the speech – again from the Corriere of 14 March 2016 – by Lino Stoppani, president of Fipe, is blatant and sharable :
The centre is filling up with public establishments. Bars, food chains, restaurants: two out of ten Milanese businesses are within the first circle of the Bastions, says the Chamber of Commerce. And they continue to increase, concentrated in certain streets.
But ‘this is not a positive figure,’ warns Lino Stoppani, who heads Fipe, the trade association.
There is an excess of supply, competition has been unleashed on prices. And it has driven down quality‘.
below, the fixed offer of a venue in the centre of Milan
Around almost everywhere, pre-cooked or pre-packed food to be heated with the microwave, while ‘kitchens and pastry shops have disappeared. Out of budget’.
Rents remain high and long opening hours are necessary to gain customers: as a result, artisanal preparation almost no longer exists.
“The risk is that only chains or establishments with standardised service will find space in the centre.
Lino Stoppani
The Italian catering industry has 320,000 businesses divided between 149,085 bars and 168,289 restaurants. The majority of bars and fast food outlets use pre-cooked food, but many restaurants, especially at lunchtime, also use food prepared in advance and then simply reheated
In Italy there are 400 catering enterprises per 100,000 residents, in France there are 329, in Germany 198 and in the United Kingdom 181.
In Milan, among the many innovations in the fast food sector over the past year, we must mention the arrival of pizza delivered to your door by the US company Domino’s
An appetiser by Claudio Sadler made with fresh, freshly cooked ingredients
And given the situation, one wonders:
willthis type of cuisine, freshly prepared, with fresh ingredients, still exist in a few years’ time?
The answer can be found here, in this article from 2024 : “The customer who has ordered on a platform sushi, pizza or fried chicken from a restaurant he knows assumes it is prepared there: in reality we riders pick it up somewhere else, in a dark kitchen…” .
According to the Corriere, there are at least six large dark kitchens [in Milan], each one run by a different catering brand. Inside the industrial warehouses, which operate behind closed gates, you can only enter if you work for Glovo, Deliveroo or Just Eat, the main home food delivery services.
The reason why places like these exist is quickly explained: online orders often far exceed those placed in the actual physical shop. As a result, restaurants struggle to keep up with all the orders and end up directing riders to a ‘secondary’ restaurant, of which the customer is unaware.
Shouldn’t cuisine done well, as Claudio Sadler does it, be the pillar on which to relaunch our tourism?
And indeed Lino Stoppani, in Corriere Economia of 21 March 2016 added
“Catering is the second reason why a foreigner comes to Italy and the first reason why he returns”.
Will this always be the case given the current degradation of the restaurant industry?
It is legitimate to wonder because in Corriere della Sera of 20 March 2016 we read:
“the average stay (*) fell from 4.1 to 3.6 days, real per capita expenditure from €1035 to €670.
And that means 38 billion in lost foreign exchange revenue…”.
Meanwhile Sadler closed his restaurant. Domino’s has also closed but it will not be missed….
(*) in Italy
Tourism generates 9.8% of world GDP (873 billion € in 2013).
In 1950 there were 20 million tourists, in 2030 there should be 1.8 billion. Tourism is the only sector of the economy growing but there is no ‘Italian tourism policy’ in sight
We report two news items on which to draw two final thoughts:
1. Company crushed by debts Metropolitan Market flop
Company crushed by debts
Metropolitan market flop
The Qualitalia brand has overdue invoices amounting to one million euros Legal actions by creditors, first seizures triggered on Friday
by Federico Berni
It was born under the good star of Expo, but now risks dying under the weight of debts. Which, according to initial estimates, exceed one million euro.
And to say that the Porta Genova Metropolitan Market experiment could have been a success. What’s more, it was a great success with the public, with quality food and culture. Not to mention an area, that of the railway yard, completely reclaimed from urban decay and consequently a benefit for an entire neighbourhood. Yesterday morning, however, in the fifteen thousand square metre area owned by Ferrovie dello Stato, there were only the bailiffs, face to face with a handful of lawyers sent by the property. In their hands were the decrees of the court of Milan.
The purpose of the visit: to make an inventory of the assets destined for attachment. A sad epilogue, born of the action of a group of five entrepreneurs. The first in what risks being a long line of unsatisfied creditors. At the centre of the case is Qualitalia, the special-purpose company in charge of managing the activities of the market on behalf of Unaproa, a large Roman consortium grouping more than a hundred fruit and vegetable producers. And which does not pay its suppliers, according to legal sources. Starting with a company from Morgex, in the Alps of Valle d’Aosta, which installed the electrical system at the Porta Genova Market and which has tried unsuccessfully to recover its credit of ninety thousand euros.
The owner prefers anonymity, but says: ‘It all seemed to be going well, then last July they stopped paying me and the other suppliers; we tried to find a solution, we even offered to find ourselves a financier to take over from Unaproa, because our interest was to continue working in Milan. Between false promises, meetings, unfulfilled return plans, in the end there was nothing to be done’. Same script for other entrepreneurs. The suppliers of the furniture, or those who took care of security, cleaning services, maintenance. First the injunctions, then the injunctions, issued by the courts of Rome and Milan, until the arrival of the bailiffs to seize the assets. At least of what remained in Porta Genova. Electric cables, tables and chairs, mezzanines and furniture of various kinds. The mass of debt, adding up the various companies that have unsuccessfully asked for payment of invoices, and the surety taken out to guarantee the rent, would therefore exceed one million euro.
A bitter end, hopefully not final, for one of the ‘taste hubs’ inaugurated last year on the wave of enthusiasm for theMilan World Expo.
Fresh fruit and vegetables sold directly by producers, a supermarket with over two thousand typical products, from pasta to wine, to buy, an area for street food, five urban gardens. But also music and cocktails, open-air cinema, merry-go-rounds, sustainability lessons for children, evenings on Milanese culture. In the summer, Ambrogio De Ponti of Unaproa enthusiastically announced his intention to expand the Tokyo business. Yesterday he could not be reached by phone at his office in Rome. A space that, in the words of Porta Genova residents, gave the neighbourhood an ‘international breath’. A place that you could ‘visit in London or some other European metropolis’. And that had completely cleaned up the railway yard, which before was ‘an area to avoid’. Where only “junkies and rats” lived, and where at most they had “an open-air market for stolen bicycles”.
2. “Brianza, another bar of the n’drangheta seized“, Corriere della Sera Friday 8 April 2016 (and this, unfortunately, is nothing new for Seregno).
The Corriere has removed the link but you can find news, updated in 2024, on the subject here: Poaching on the Po and the quality of the fish in some ‘restaurants’
After the abolition of licences, the subsequent wave of openings with the advent of Expo – and its nefarious effects (the €5 entrance fee in the evening), the oversupply – the uberisation of dark kitchens with Delivery [which worsens the quality of the food], more extensive, transparent and in-depth information on the catering world would be of great help in highlighting the problems and healing the sector.
But since we are certain that the cases in point 2) are far more numerous than those actually communicated, and that irregularly run restaurants are the majority, ‘we see it as hard…’.
Contributed by Enrico Rizzi
