Eataly Turin Italy

 

It offers high quality food, traditionally produced by small scale local producers, and therefore only available in limited numbers.
Despite its focus on local, artisanal foods and beverages, Eataly is far from a small-sized speciality store. Quite the contrary. Eataly in Turin covers an area of some 11,000 square metres in an historic industrial complex in Turin, the former Carpano vermouth production plant. This site has been renovated and – as Eataly describes it in a corporate brochure – “[…] turned into a huge hub for buying, eating and learning about the best food and wine Italy has to offer.”

 

Local, national and imported
Retail – or ‘Marketplace’ in Eataly’s terminology – covers 2,500 square metres of space and 5,000 square metres are dedicated to education about quality food, comprising classrooms that are used for courses and tastings, a library, a museum and a conference room. Furthermore, Eataly hosts ten restaurants whose cooks exclusively use the selected products that are sold in the marketplace area. Special is the restaurant ‘GUIDOperEATALY’ the menu of which is composed of – among others – products endorsed by the Slow Food movement, which has its roots in Italy.
Eataly’s founder – Oscar Farinetti – is an old friend of Slow Food president Carlo Petrini. While conceiving the idea of Eataly, Farinetti proposed Slow Food Italy to become Eataly’s strategic consultant. This implies selecting suppliers to Eataly through appropriate selection criteria (e.g. product quality, production method, availability of raw materials, variety, necessary certifications for retail) and collaboration in setting up educational activities and supervising their academic content.
Not all of Eataly Turin’s 40,000 food items are sourced locally. “We also have national brands and a few imported products that are the best in their category and which you wish to find in a place where you go to buy high quality food,” says Eataly’s spokesperson Simona Milvo. Examples she mentions are pata negra ham from Spain, special foie gras from France, oysters from Normandy and beers from all over Europe. When it comes to local sourcing, Eataly Turin considers suppliers based in the Piedmont region.

‘Ark of Taste’
Consulting Eataly fits in well with Slow Food’s aims, which includes the defence of food biodiversity and education of taste. The non-profit organisation has catalogued hundreds of extraordinary products from around the world. These are included in ‘Slow Food’s Ark of Taste’.

Store characteristics Total surface: 11,000m2 - retail area: 2,500 m2 - teaching/education area: 5,000m2 Opening hours: 10 a.m. – 10.30 p.m. (7 days a week) Assortment: 40,000 food items Average basket spend: €30-35 Employees: 220

However, to protect these suppliers and their products from extinction, more is needed. Therefore Slow Food created the ‘Presidia’, which are small projects to assist groups of artisan producers, giving their products an economically viable basis. All over Italy Slow Food has 197 Presidia and abroad there are 95 Slow Food Presidia in 42 countries worldwide.
The northern province of Piedmont – where Turin is situated – has 27 of these Presidia and is the second largest in numbers, after Sicily which hosts 30 Slow Food Presidia. Slow Food uses the presentation area on the lower floor of Eataly Turin to communicate its message and present food products from producers that belong to local Slow Food Presidia. According to Eataly, these are hard-to-find items not stocked by normal shops and chain supermarkets.
The products showcased here are the only products in Eataly carrying the Slow Food logo. In Eataly’s regular retail areas Slow Food is not branded, as the organisation stresses that its participation in Eataly is not speculative. As a non-profit organisation, Slow Food has no financial participation in Eataly, nor does it run commercial activities in any sense. All this is for the greater good of – as Slow Foods describes it – “[…] helping the work of those who make quality food and guarantee products which are good, clean and fair, sold at reasonable prices to consumers who want to eat better on a daily basis.”

Slow start, fast roll out
In line with the Slow Food credo, founding father Farinetti took his time to conceive, plan and develop Eataly. Four years after the initial idea, the first store was opened in Turin on 27 January 27. Since the opening, Eataly has welcomed some 1.5 million customers whose average basket spend was between €30-35. “We have all kinds of customers,” Milvo says. “Not just food lovers but also a lot of customers who do their daily shopping under the adage of ‘let’s eat less, but let’s eat high-quality food’. Others come just once a week to buy something special and also a lot of tourists visit us as they can spend their time eating, shopping, but also doing a real full immersion in what is considered Italian traditions about gastronomy. For all customers we have a full range of products, from prime price products to more expensive products.”
Eataly plans to open other stores in Italy’s large cities of Genoa, Milan, Verona, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Naples, Bari and Palermo. To expand the network, Eataly looks at unique locations that have to be sizeable: between 5,000 and 10,000 square metres. Stores with the size of a hypermarket, but contrary to this rational yet industrial retail format, Eataly claims to be a radical departure from other forms of large-scale retailing by its dedication to food and wine products.

Ambitious plans, ambitious funding
Ambitious plans, which of course need ambitious funding. Who are therefore the investors behind Eataly? “Eataly Distribuzione s.r.l. is a private joint-stock company,” says spokesperson Simona Milvo, who confirms that among the investors are three members of Coop Italia: Coop Adriatica, Coop Liguria and Novacoop Piedmonte. Milvo: “Eataly Turin has been created with the support of the City of Turin, the Province of Turin and the Region of Piedmont. The funds to establish other centres all over Italy are provided by Eataly Distribuzione and by other private investors interested in the project.”
Eataly’s ambitions stretch all the way to the US, where it plans to open its first store around May 2008. It will rent an area of 7,000 square metres on a prestigious – yet expensive – location, New York’s Rockefeller Center. Opening of a second US store is scheduled for the second half of 2008. Its investors will therefore need to have deep pockets, combined with the confidence that Eataly will offer something different to New York’s gourmet-savvy customers. Will Eataly make a difference, given the value-added food retail that is already present in the Big Apple? “We would like to export our concept of high-quality food that is different from the kind of bio and organic stores that you can already find in New York,” says Milvo. “Both our US shopping malls will be supplied with authentic Italian food and by the same suppliers that are already involved in Eataly Turin. Of course, with the exception of fresh foods.”
Currently, North America accounts for six Slow Food Presidia, one in Canada and the other five in the US. This number is surely to rise, once Eataly has set up shop in the US.