"Made in Italy could be the roof of the world", a potential gold mine that we do not know how to exploit. "At the international level we are lagging behind countries that are much smaller than us: we do not know where the business goes and how to intercept the right market segments". He has no doubts Fabrizio Zerbini, lecturer at the Escp Europe (Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris), the oldest and one of the most prestigious business schools in the world.
Introduced by Roberta Rampini, journalist of the newspaper The day, the economist intervened on Festival of Food Journalism with a lesson on market trends at European level. "In France there are sectors of the food industry that produce 40% more than in Italy. In Germany the meat sector has a double value than ours. Not to mention the United Kingdom, which has managed to sell wine to Italy, cheese from France and chocolate from Belgium: on the exports to Russia we are towed by other smaller states, in Norway the per capita expenditure on food is double compared to Italy, in Northern Europe the cost of living is higher, d agreement, but that doesn't explain everything ".
"Maybe our products are less good? - Zerbini asked himself - Maybe our wine or our cheeses are worth less? Obviously not". What's the problem then? The point is to understand where the business is going, which sectors and which emerging areas. There are, of course, virtuous examples: "one of these is Eataly, which has been able to export the model of Italian good food all over the world. In Italy it works not so much because we go there, but because tourists go there". Also good for some niches, "like the idea of the ice cream tree, a project started in Brianza that has also made a fortune in the United States". But they are, in fact, niches, which do not have the strength to deal with the international giants of food.
di Lorenzo Montanaro with Monica Merola e Sara Iacomussi (Futura)
