Eataly is one of the most interesting things to happen in the retail market of food and beverage. One of the distinctive elements of this distributive format is the centrality of the cliente experience within each store location. Today we are here to speak with Paolo Bongiovanni, manager of marketing in Italy for Eataly. Paolo, hello, can you tell us a bit about Eataly as a project, about the business idea and how it was developed. The idea of Eataly was born from Oscar Farinetti, which now is more than ten years old, since 2004. The thought was to give high quality, principally, Italian food to the most people possible, a democratic proposal for everyone. In the retail world Italy has always historically been divided, form the local bottegas that sold goods of high quality but at prices outside the reach of many, to grand distributors that clearly did not focus on quality, but instead, had an accessible price and quantity for everyone. In our opinion, too little attention to quality and to the producers. Therefore, Eataly was born for one simple idea: present the quality that is found in the gastronomic Italian culture and agriculture, take this quality and be able to deliver it at the best affordable price possible. There basically had not been an idea like this before and even now there is no one else that does this other than Eataly. It is based only on a few fundamental principles, which are: absolute respect for quality and the producers; and having a really short production chain, we are in direct contact with all of our producers and buy directly from them agreeing on the price point. A simple proposal with simple communication. Basically the food is the same that we would put on our table when we all get together for a meal. Therefore, just like we speak with our friends every day, we think that communication in food should be handled the same. The idea is to be informal but prepared, all of the formalities are for the attention to detail and quality. all of the seriousness is for the dish and the product. Fundamentally, we are based on the ideas that form the foundation of the slow food movement, that is that the food be good, clean, and right. The food must be good: it must be enjoyed, have good taste, and be something that invites us to try it. It has to be clean: it cannot be harmful, nor should it contain chemicals, that is, it should not contain anything that doesn’t lend itself directly to the product, no colorants, additives, or conservatives. It has to be right: that is, it has to be grown and/or cultivated in a completely ethical way. You have to respect the land, animals, and the whole process, respect the producer too, therefore, you need to decide on a price together so that he or she can be justly compensated so that he or she is able to continue producing quality. Therefore, Eatly is a simple idea that, maybe, no one else had ever had or at least implemented before. The distributive format is actually a combination of previous existing ones. It’s as if Eataly had combined other formats and so this is actually the true innovation. Actually, let’s say that if you think about it, it’s not innovation, but rediscovery. Oscar, Eataly’s founder, always says to have thought of Eataly the first time he entered the bazaar in Istanbul: a place where you can buy, eat, learn, stop, study, study. Eataly puts the concept of a restaurant, buying and selling, and teaching and learning together: A restaurant because since the food has to be tasted we strive to bring it directly to the customer cooking it as little as possible, so attention to this above all else; buying and selling because we want to give the clients the products directly, and one of our fundamentals is we cook what we sell and we sell what we cook therefore if you want to purchase an extravergine olive oil, it will be the same olive oil that we use in the restaurant, the products are all the same; teaching and learning because a good food product is like anything else, that is, when you know it well, you appreciate it more, you think more highly of it, you respect it more. You learn you understand a product, just like anything else, if you understand what’s behind it, the work the people, everything that’s behind it, you appreciate it more. Eataly is these three things together, a restaurant, a store, and a place to learn, just like the big markets and bazaars. Alright, so what you’re saying from the consumers’ point of view means that it’s a very unique experience, when the customer goes into an Eataly location he or she is immersed in a world of experiences. Okay, according to you, as you have planned, what design choices have you made in order to transfer this experience to the customers? The first thing that many of Eatalys clients say to us when they first come in is, “How does it work?” this is because some come in expecting a restaurant and see shelves, while others come in expecting a store and see restaurants and areas to learn. Surely the first impression is one of discovery and surprise, enjoyable too we hope. The shops of Eataly, in our opinion, how we pose Eataly to the clients is very simple because all of the effort should be on the product, on the food, so we use white shelving, white walls all the channels of communication are simple. The pictures of the food are not the final dish but rather the raw ingredients, All the surfaces are natural, made from marble, and therefore the thing that occupies the most space in Eatly is light. This is a fundamental thing that I have noticed in each store. The type of communication is also very important. We have chosen to adopt is, like with everything else very simple, respectful, and educative, but also ironic. There’s a nice poster in the entranceway that says, “No one is perfect, even we make mistakes.” This doubt is what is so great with each of us, it allows us to change and evolve. So Eataly plays on this double standard since it try to convey itself as clean, white and puts the product at the center of attention. Are the spaces in Eataly designed in a particular way in order to lend well to this experience? Yes, light is fundamental in all the stores. For example, now, we are in a store that is wrapped up in light. The design for the all the stores are projected internally: we have an office that is made up of a technical division and a design division which creates the stores. Eataly was founded with its own rulebook, or its own Ten Commandments, one of which says, never place brick on brick but rather refurbish existing, historic building that have fallen into disuse. Almost all Eatalys are in previously old buildings that were either closed down, or completely abandoned. That means we were able to give the space a new life, and a new story to tell. There’s a pathos that only comes from the building and is important in telling Eataly’s story. Eataly has locations in various countries around the world: the USA, Brazil, Japan, and Turkey. Does the format change from country to country or does it have a standard that is just copied? Surely it does not have a standard. There is no stamp that is just stamped across various countries. We say that each location of Eatly is part of a family, a family which shares the Eataly last name but each with its own first name and personality. Therefore, Eataly surely changes with respect to the location and that location’s history. It is a complete change, a complete adaptation to the territory. Each store is its own being, different from the others, even though they are all recognizable under “Eataly” for certain characteristics that they share and for the image and experience they offer, which abroad is even more recognizable. Actually I think that one thing we export to other places abroad is our ability, to contaminate, migrate, and re-discover other places. We integrate ourselves in these places and in this sense, this “contamination” is also part of Eataly. Therefore, the location in New York is Italian, but it’s also Italian-American, the locations in Japan are cleaner, more reduced, and more minimalist in a way. Structurally, the stores, especially abroad are different, contaminated from its surroundings. Speaking about the vendors you mentioned before, which are a crucial aspect for Eataly’s business model, are there certain criteria that you’ve adopted when you choose them? First of all, you’ll noticed that we prefer to say producers and not vendors because in our definition, “we speak directly with who produces from the land, farms, etc. We rarely trust distributors, being said of course, abroad there are some that we go through, but the selection of them and the producers is of utmost importance for when it comes to opening up an store. Fundamental to this is the help from the Slow Food movement. The Slow Food Foundation has always been a strategic partner of Eataly’s. The first proposals for producers in a given location, which remember that 40% of which are local products and 60% are national products, come from Slow Food and the excellencies found in the territories and their valuable and high quality production processes. We then select, encounter, and discover producers keeping in mind the three previous concepts that we’ve talked about: good, clean, and right. We often work with very small producers. I remember the first few times that we worked with a producer of cheese from Castelmagno who had never sold to large distributors and so the first deliveries came in through the postal system. We then had to explain that quality attention according to the HACCP was necessary. As said, the first selections come from the support of Slow Food, after which those who are a part of our purchasing office explore the territory the store is in. We frequently go to visit various places that produce things that could possibly be new products and high quality products, both in Italy and abroad. Okay, now about the actual store floor inside each location, obviously the staff is a very important role from the restaurants, to the back, to the store-section. Are there any particular approaches that you have, if any, in terms of managing the staff and how you and they interact with the clientele. Yes, the staff and the collaborators make up an important part. They are the very first thing, the most important thing, because it’s them who interact and speak with the clients. I believe that a good example is what we tell the staff in the restaurants and the stores, which is to show and give a good example and how one should act using good manners and sense when interacting with the clients which are important values. We ask our staff to be informal, but prepared, well mannered, and informed about each product. We obviously train them on many things concerning the various foods and products thanks also to our friends from Slow Food. We obviously work with people that already come from the restaurant industry and are already very well trained and prepared, but we also work with people who are much younger and those who may not have as much experience in a restaurant. So an initial training is of course necessary. Obviously it’s impossible to explain everything before starting to work, not even I know everything about the products. For that reason we suggest to our employees when a client asks something that he or she doesn’t know, to respond saying that you don’t know and that you’ll go find out from someone who does. We’re talking about food which is no laughing matter. That the most important thing for the people that work with us, we are always looking for people who are curious and want to learn more about the products, the food, the quality, and this informal way of serving customers. Then there are people who work their whole lives at an Eataly, or people like students that decide to go off to do their own thing after only a few months or years. That’s the fundamental training that we employ. Sometimes when you enter in an Eataly it gives you the feeling of being crowded which is good because it means that it’s full of clients; but sometimes when there’s too much of a crowd in a service environment there’s the risk that there could be a negative impact on the clients’ satisfaction or their perception of the place’s quality. How do you regulate this, if you even do? Luckily we were able to make the people understand that often being slow, now I’ll say something a little paradoxical, is a virtue. Definitely in food, being slow is a virtue. When someone tastes a dish prepared here, or a product purchased here he or she understands that it’s something special, or rather that all the time spent waiting really pays off. Therefore we’re really happy to say that we were able to have our clients expect to have to be more patient than with some other distributors. If a person goes to a large distributor and has to wait in line, he or she would get annoyed right away but we have people that are very patient and that’s a great thing. There are some calmer days and some hectic ones, so sometimes lines form, but that’s a given. Let’s say that in these cases we have don’t defined ways of keeping everything under control: of course, we look to always act with a good sense of manners and civic order, and we look to manage these situations in a humane way. A client’s experience doesn’t start when he or she enters the location, rather it starts before and then continues afterwards with a want to share what he or she experienced. What do you do for this pre-experience, before the client enters the location and what do you do for the post-one, after the client leaves? Luckily there are many people that already know about Eataly, especially in the cities where we are located and we we able to create an association between Eataly and food of high quality. In a certain way this helps us in spreading the word and letting people know about Eataly and making them want to come in. We don’t advertise ourselves much, especially not in TV, we have some outlets through newspapers and the internet, we have a section that follows activity on the web and on social media, but most of the communication we do is in the store itself. I always that the the best advertisement for Eataly is the smell that the bakery gives off. The moment of discovery or re-discovery comes in Eataly, I could talk to you for hours about a type of prosciutto or cherry, we’re in cherry season, but the moment that you try it for yourself is the moment you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You’ll discover it, or sometimes “re”-discover it because maybe it’s a product that is part of your culture, but it’s been a while since you’ve found a version of it with this high of a quality. That’s the important moment of discovery that often happens in Eataly. The next step, is something that we’ve noticed and are very happy about, is that maybe there’s a client who’s already come in, and now he or she invites some friends bringing them with him or her, explaining Eataly to them. We’ll see people wandering the shelves saying, “Look here, there are dried Apulian tomatoes, cool! Over there there’s mozzarella,” they’re teaching about mozzarella now. Our customers themselves become our promoters if we managed to win them over, if our products and food has won them over. We are luckily to be able to say that our marketing is very simple, our products do it by pleasing the palate or the person who tastes it.
