First draft 19 May 2011.Last updated 19 April 2026 The e-commerce project took shape in 1999 and was signed by Giuseppe Caprotti and Paolo De Gennis, with the endorsement of Bernardo Caprotti. Bernardo and Giuseppe Caprotti at Cà del Bosco in 2003, among them Paolo De Gennis Esselunga’s management was supported by the consulting firm Mc Kinsey headed at the time by senior partners Roger Abravanel and Yoram Gutgeld, later and respectively advisor to the Esselunga group, the former, and advisor to Matteo Renzi, the latter. This was a notable exception: apart from the organisation of work in supermarkets, Esselunga had never used a consultancy firm. Esselunga and McKinsey formed mixed teams for a project of strategic importance. The esteem between Abravanel and De Gennis, who were both born in Libya, where they had met as youngsters, favoured the success of the project. Andrea Zocchi (*), later briefly DG of Esselunga, was the project leader for Mc Kinsey, while De Gennis and I supervised the work on behalf of Esselunga. Andrea Zocchi (*) Today Andrea Zocchi is CEO of Easycoop(the Coop‘s e-commerce company) while Paolo De Gennis is a shareholder. For Esselunga at Home, as had happened with the Superstores or Fidaty, we looked to the US for inspiration. With De Gennis, who officially ran the e-commerce division until I took over as managing director in the summer of 2002, we visited several e-tailers, such as, for instance, webvan (which served to make us realise what not to do…) The question mark and the “no” on the article are by yours truly (*) name invented by Dario Bassetti (photo below) who was also the head of the division, after having been marketing director of Esselunga. At this point, a warehouse dedicated exclusively to e-commerce had been set up in San Giuliano Milanese to serve the city. After a few months, Esselunga a Casa arrived in Prato, using, as in the case of the Monza warehouse, the back of the supermarket in Via Valentini:
