The one related to care and concern for the environment is a project that goes back a long way, to the 1980s, the first years I spent at Esselunga, and began with organic and natural products in general. It is also the project I am most fond of because it had a soul, a social purpose, as well as a business purpose.
The idea was also that Esselunga, representing a model of entrepreneurial and commercial excellence on the Italian scene, could also be so from an environmental and social point of view.
I remember a conversation, in the kitchen in Via del Lauro, about the amount of pesticides in strawberries. It was 1987, before I left to work in the United States. I wanted to create ‘natural’ product lines; my father Bernardo less so. At that time, I had no reference from an environmental point of view, I simply followed my instincts.
In the 1990s, I developed my ideas and my programme in contact with the ethologist Danilo Mainardi (Lipu), listening to and reading Lester R. Brown (author of ‘State of the World’, Italian edition edited by Gianfranco Bologna), Fulco Pratesi, with whom we launched some joint WWF- Esselunga operations, and Enrico Albertini with whom we organised an operation in favour of the forests of Gabon, with Trust the Forest, managed by Gustavo Gandini.
The continuous food crises of those years, from ‘mad cow disease’ to dioxin-tainted chicken, gave me a big hand in introducing integrated pest management, and later organic, products into the Esselunga assortment.
In the early 1990s, organically farmed items with supplier labels were added and highlighted on the shelves.
This was the beginning of a journey that lasted approximately 12 years: after the organic farming articles, the launch of ‘Naturama’ products (1995) and the inclusion of Altromercato fair trade products (1998), followed by ‘Esselunga Bio’ products, the first products with the Ecolabel ‘For those who love nature’ (2001), and finally ‘Esselunga Bio’ fair trade products (2002). To reach 10% of Esselunga’s food turnover of approximately €300 million in 2003.
The launch of Esselunga Bio, in just seven months, was certainly the most important adventure. It came about during a long car journey in February 1999 in which, in addition to myself, who was then sales director, and Gaetano Puglisi, there was also the director of quality assurance Claudio Arnoldi and senior food buyer Alberto Bianchi.
The marketing idea was to cover all market brackets: the low end with the first prices – at that time there was the Fidel brand – the middle range with Esselunga and Naturama and the high end with Esselunga Bio.
Naturama and Bio products also had the merit of reassuring a clientele frightened by the worsening quality of food and increasingly aware that ‘we are what we eat’.
Obviously there was more to it than just these motivations: through the sale of certain products and the explanation of their why, an attempt was being made to stimulate and build awareness: the condition of the Earth, from the planet in general to the microsystem in which the customer lived, was very bad, because exploitation was too intense and was causing immeasurable damage both ecologically and economically, widening the gap between wealth and poverty, and not only in the poorest countries.
In practice, those years saw the birth of what was to become Esselunga’s formal commitment to the planet, nature, people and culture, spelt out in the seminal ‘Social Report’ of 2003, which states that the company’s mission is to believe ‘in sustainable development, understood as the integration of environment, social equity and economic growth’.
Those same points also bring profound innovation to relations with personnel, suppliers, and customers: the brochure ‘Values and Principles’, created with company personnel (2002 and 2003), makes it clear how people, internal and external (customers) are the company’s founding values, and by integrating and collaborating towards the same end, according to rules of attention to themselves, their neighbours and their surroundings, they will achieve a positive result of their commitment according to the golden rule formulated by C.M. Cipolla in his ‘Allegro ma non troppo’: if a person performs an action that benefits him and at the same time benefits others (and, we now add, the environment), he acts as an intelligent person.
