Drafted on 22 February 2024, updated on 5 July 2026
“Another factor that helps us enormously is the creation of the ESD Italia central purchasing organisation, with twenty-five partners, amongst whom our colleagues from the Selex chain stand out in particular (…). Paolo De Gennis (…) provides me with vital support thanks to his acquaintance with Riccardo Francioni, general counsel of the Selex group ( pictured below). When I decided to move in this direction, I studied the contracts that suppliers had with the initiative’s partners, who are our competitors in the market. I realised (…) that Esselunga was often treated unfairly, with less favourable terms. I took the analysis I’d carried out to my father, and he became convinced that the central purchasing organisation was ‘a good and right thing’.
Marcello Cestaro, who heads one of the groups that make up Selex, jokingly describes our union as that between ‘the beauty’ – that is, Esselunga – and ‘the beast’ – that is, Selex. Because Esselunga is probably the ‘most beautiful’ chain in Europe, albeit isolated and somewhat haughty, whilst Selex consists of a disparate array of shops – sometimes excellent, sometimes less so – with a chain of command that is a little more lax than Esselunga’s.
Some Selex partners, who sit on the ESD board of directors, never attend meetings, yet their companies pocket the valuable discounts that the alliance manages to secure from suppliers – which are higher than before. Even so, despite the agreements we strike at head office, Selex in the regions often manages to renegotiate them to its own advantage, with the result that companies much smaller than ours secure better terms than we do. The lesson in humility we learn from this is immense. The ‘beast’, in fact, helps the ‘beauty’ enormously to build ‘critical mass’, understand the market and double its profitability. (pp. 208–209).
“[After being dismissed from Esselunga] I found a temporary post at the ESD central purchasing organisation, from which I resigned a year later, in 2005. There, too, I realised how the atmosphere had changed. In Milan at that time, there were people who would cross the road when they saw me. At a certain point, the lies were set out in black and white in the 2003 annual report of Supermarkets Italiani, our holding company, where it was stated that following my dismissal, ‘the company had taken drastic measures aimed […] to restoring the ethical values and standards of conduct on which its reputation has always been based”. And from that official document, the story made its way into the far more widely read pages of the *Corriere della Sera*. Those final months at ESD, however, served to confirm that I was right about Esselunga’s results. The central purchasing organisation, in fact, acts as an intermediary in the promotional contributions paid by suppliers. It is there that I can verify how the expected funds continue to flow into Esselunga’s accounts, from which ESD collects a small percentage to cover its own costs.” (p. 266).
