Today we are here with Giuseppe Morici who is the president of Barilla Europe. Barilla is the largest pasta producer in the world, so the interview will be about the market of pasta worldwide and the specificity of Italian pasta and Barilla as the market leader. Giuseppe pasta is the basis of Italian culinary tradition, but it's also a very well consumed product abroad, so what is the specificity of this product which makes it so well consumed in many different countries? Well, this is a very good question. Actually, pasta is one of the two or three main largest commodities in the world, together with rice, for example. It is one of the main sources of carbohydrates for entire parts of the planet. There are a few basic fundamental reasons for that. One is that pasta is a cheap product. It's affordable for large parts of the population. Two is that it is very easy to cook and it's very versatile so it fits many different cuisines in the world. Despite its cultural origin in Italy, in Italian cuisine, it can fit many different local adaptations in terms of cuisine. The third factor is that pasta actually is healthy. It is a good source of complex carbohydrates, which is good for your health. This combination of factors makes pasta a universal food. Barilla being a global leader, it has does the possibility to overview different markets and different geographies, with different traditions, different tastes, so when you sell your products abroad, how much of the value proposition do you adapt or how much do you keep it standardized? Yeah. Well, the more you go international, of course, the more you face this issue. In the beginning of the internationalization of an Italian brand, an Italian product, you start, basically, bringing abroad your own authentic and integral proposition. The more you grow in the specific countries where you expand, the more you face these questions. What we try to do is to balance out the integrity of the brand, which of course has to remain the flag of Italy, so we say, number one in Italy. You have to say a specific how-to in your recipe development, which means they way you combine ingredients and the cleanness of the proposition and the combination of ingredients which is one of the secrets of the Italian cuisine in general. We combine elementary simple ingredients in a simple way: not complicated, not sophisticated, but you have to start doing this at a certain point also combining with local ingredients and local traditions. It's more the brand integrity, the how-to, which remains Italian, but then you start localizing some of the what. Can you give us some examples of how to adapt to different countries, different cultures? Well one example is in pasta, and one example is in sauces. You have more examples in sauces than pasta, because pasta is a simple product. Which fits, really, as I've said before, many different cultures and needs. There is one example in pasta, for example, the soft wheat with egg pasta, that we launched in Brazil. In Italy we do pasta with durum wheat. It's our tradition. In Brazil, for a number of reasons, they also do pasta with soft wheat, which is the same wheat we use for bread, but combined with eggs to add the protein level that we source from durum wheat, typically. They combine two ingredients that they have locally, soft wheat and eggs, to produce a pasta which is more al dente, as we say. And so we have decided to adequate our offering to that market. And to offer both durum wheat made in Italy and soft wheat with egg developed locally. Many more examples you have in sauces, where the recipes vary much much more depending on the local tastes. In that case, as I said before, we try to maintain, of course, some link to the “Italianity” of the brand, but we don't refuse the idea of using local ingredients like, I don't know, cheese recipes or meat recipes. Many many populations outside Italy have an intensive use of meat in sauces, more than we do in Italy sometimes. We do that, we try to do it the same way an innovative Italian chef would do it. Good. What about the occasions of usage? I mean, in Italy, we have very traditional cases of usage. We eat pasta at meals, but in other parts of the world is it common or is it not so unfrequent to have different occasions of usage for pasta or is it very standardized? No, it's not at all, and that's one of the first challenges you face when you go international with pasta. There are two specificities. One is that people may use pasta as we do for the main dish but they do it combined with a source of protein. Pasta has the role that, in Italy, bread has, with meat. You have the typical scallops with pasta or any sort of fish with pasta in the same dish. That is the same occasion but very different usage, and also a different mission of your product in the dish. So you have to come up with cuts, with shapes that fit that need. Typically, it's white, no condiment, because the condiment is on the protein base. So you have to think about a product that fits that dish. The second complication or specificity is completely different occasions. In some parts of the world like Turkey or to some extent, we could also say China, although it's not our type of pasta, it's a breakfast product. What type of pasta do you design for an occasion which is at eight A.M. in the morning? It's a question mark that poses very important challenges to R&D and of course to marketing. Very good. Along this way of reasoning, you also have markets where pasta is in the beginning of its life cycle and markets where pasta competes in a mature market. What kind of education or what kind of adaptation of your strategy do you have to adopt in case you want to open up a new market, or when you compete in a well developed market or mature market? Yeah. This is also very important in a company's life. We have faced the issue of using one marketing model and one strategy model for many different countries and failing miserably, as you learn at school but then you tend to forget in real life. After some failures, we have come up with a model, which we call the Barilla replicable model, which basically segments the markets in the world into tiers. Where the tiering is not development only based and starting from our own position in the market, so how much you're known, how much is your market share; but it’s also based on how much the market is developed, the pasta market, the sauces market, but also how much the Italian cuisine culture and awareness is developed. All these combinations in an algorithm produced a number of tiers. You have countries where, basically, there is no Italian cuisine culture and awareness, no pasta market and no Barilla presence. It's like the basic tier. The opposite is where the Italian culture is very developed: Italy, of course, US, and the pasta market and sauces market is very developed and we are the leader: US, Italy, Sweden, etc. In between you have all the different combinations. We use two very different marketing strategies. Product, assortment, communication, in-store activations, packaging, very different according to the four or five tiers that you have. This is something that we started recently and it’s working very well. Given that pasta is so well distributed, consumed in many different countries of the world, can we still proudly say that pasta is an Italian product? Or should we start saying that pasta is a global product, which a different, I don't know-? This is a very profound question as you know. The source of food, the cultural and physical source of food is a big discussion around the world. Of course, you know, that pasta historically was not born in Italy, as well as the tomato, historically, was not born in Italy, as well as coffee, historically, was not born in Italy. So what does it mean for food to be from Italy? I think it has much more to do with how you process, develop, qualify, enrich the ingredients with your know-how, with your saper-fare as we say in Italian, than with the physical source of ingredients. Yes, pasta is a global market, very much developing in a very high number of countries, but in all those countries, they call it pasta, with the Italian word. When they don't call it pasta, and very often, they call it something close to macarone, macaroni, a word like that, they really mean something else. They mean something, which is very similar, technically speaking, is kind of the same, more or less, but culturally, it fits a different kind of usage. When it is à la Italian, they call it pasta. I think we can say that it's still an Italian item. One question I have in mind is Barilla has the opportunity to learn from many different markets, or many different culture, habits, and traditions, how do you learn and how do you transform what you learn from different markets into your decisions, innovation decisions or strategic decisions? How much of the learning from one market is transferred to other markets? Yeah, this has been very important for Barilla in the last ten - fifteen years in terms of also organizational strategy and design development, Because depending on where you put your ears you listen to different stories. If you put all your organizational ears into one country, especially if it is Italy in the case of a pasta manufacturer, you continue to hear the same story from Italian consumers; and your eyes, in Italy, they look at the Italian reality. The more you deploy, not necessarily you shift all of them but you deploy more eyes and more ears and more brains into the different parts of the world and the world is, in this food for sure, a very large and diverse place and the more you can learn from the diversity. So we are doing that, we are an organization in a way that strategic market, operating market, and also some parts of R&D are located in the many parts of the world, exactly to understand more of the local realities. For example there's one trend which we would have not captured, had we not located elsewhere, some of our eyes and ears, which is convenience. Convenience is a trend, is a consumer need, which was culturally born in the US and then, of course, in some of the Anglo-Saxon countries also in Europe. It was not born in southern Europe, so if you place all your capabilities in southern Europe, you miss at least for some years the convenience trend, the speed of preparation of food, the ease of preparation, the number of tools you have to use. Convenience is an example of this. Linked to this how much does technology impact the pasta business? I mean, pasta is a kind of food that should be prepared, so the way you prepare it and the technology of preparation can change a lot. Are there any innovations or any new trends that you envision or you are leveraging on that have to do with the impact of technology on pasta preparation? Well, first of all, technology is very important in the pasta manufacturing process, because pasta is a very industrial intensive business and so the way the manufacturing process and the technology behind the machines work to deliver every time the same product that you were expecting even 50 years ago, but in a different way, in a more modern, innovative, quality assuring way, is already a big challenge. When it comes to the technology applied at home, so in the houses of people, that's also important. Let me give you just one example. If you go and do marketing of pasta in China, just scratching the surface, and without getting into the details, you risk not understanding that people don't have a strainer, a colander in their houses. So they don't have the basic tool, they don't have the pot and they don't have a strainer, so they miss the basic tools to cook pasta the way we cook it. So you have to adapt your messaging and adapt also your products somehow to the technology they in the house: the wok. For example you can cook pasta in a wok using water as it evaporates instead of boiling it into a pot of water. So, you can adapt. Then, if your question goes more into the innovative technology that we are kind of using, there are a number of streams, of course. One is always with packaging. Food innovation is, four times out of five, about processing and preserving, and packaging. And that is always a stream. Another stream is to take some of the technology that we use in the companies and take them to home. Barilla is about to launch, in Italy, a new system, we call it Cucina Barilla, “Barilla Kitchen.” Which basically does it all at home, starting from the basic ingredients. In partnership with Whirlpool, we are launching a system which basically recognizes the product from a code that is stamped on the packaging. The packaging gives instructions to the machine through this code that the machine reads and the machine does it all. Basically cooks it, prepares it, even with a delay of twelve hours if you want to do it from the night to the morning. It prepares bread, cakes, risotto, pasta, and all sorts…. This is bringing some of the technology that we were using in house to bring it to the last mile. Would it mean that in the next future, we would no longer need any competence to cook? I hope not. My personal hope is for not. You know that in New York, many of the new houses have no kitchen. I'm not sure I like that, personally. Maybe I'm becoming too old, and I hope that it would be just a matter of segmenting the occasions. And so you have your busy Wednesdays, and your relaxing weekends, and will just choose when to be a good cook and when to be delegating your capabilities to a machine instead of being replaced completely by a machine. Some people say we're not living in the era of technology, we are living in the era of choices, and I hope this is true because choices give you the choice of not choosing technology when you don't want to. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
