March-April-2018

ROUSES

EVERYDAY

MARCH | APRIL 2018

the

Authentic Italian

issue

hen Luigi Lavazza opened his grocery store

in 1895, radio had not yet been invented and

Puccini was writing

La boh

. To the west,

post-Impressionists seized the art world,

and names like Cezanne and Gauguin filled

the void left by Van Gogh and Seurat. Bookshops carried the new

works by Tolstoy, Kipling, Verne and Salgari. And in his little store,

Lavazza began experimenting with imported sacks of coffee and

roasting them for his Torinese clientele.

Good coffee is as much a part of the Italian culture as linguine

or pesto. To survive — let alone

define

—

that culture is a sign of

just how good Lavazza’s coffee was, and remains. He pioneered the

practice of blending coffee. Like wine, a coffee bean’s natural aroma

is drawn from a region’s soil, water, climate and weather. A trip to

Brazil confirmed this for him, and Lavazza went on to explore the

chemistry of coffee and the happy intersections of regional flavors.

Soon the little Lavazza store on Via San Tommaso garnered a

following far beyond the town of Turin. Lavazza was a man of his

time, elevating coffee into art, and giving the world something it

had never before experienced.

The Family Business

In 1927,Luigi Lavazza incorporated his burgeoning coffee company,

and the long and lonely journey of the coffee bean — from South

America to Europe to Northern Italy — suddenly became one mile

too short. It wasn’t enough to reach his shop, where Luigi might

test blends and find harmony.The coffee now had somehow to get

to the homes of his customers and countrymen. Lavazza learned

to carve a corporate path that involved sales, packing, shipping and

marketing. It wasn’t enough to build a business. He was building a

business that scaled, a business

that would last.

And last it did.Today, Lavazza dominates the Italian coffee market,

and is the seventh-largest roaster in the world. You’ve probably had

it while traveling abroad, or plucked it from a local grocery store

shelf: ground or whole, espresso or decaf.Twenty-seven billion cups

of Lavazza coffee are consumed annually, and it can be found in 90

countries.

For a company to cross the century mark and reach those sorts of

numbers, it has to have figured a few things out. Part of the coffee’s

longevity is the Lavazza name.While Luigi puzzled together first a

little market and later a coffee brand, he and his wife raised a family.

Adaughter and two sons came into their own alongside the company,

and were raised hearing about blends and roasts and learning about

the lands where the beans took root. Luigi’s children eventually

came to control the family business; then his grandchildren, and

then his great-grandchildren. Love has kept the company going,

thriving — and daring, where faceless conglomerates might have

taken safer roads.

There were setbacks along the way, and lessons yet to be learned.

Picasso was still painting when the company nearly went bankrupt

in the early 1970s. A turn of harsh winters wiped out the Brazilian

coffee industry and threatened to take the enterprising

importer down with it. Tricky negotiation and a lot of

luck kept Lavazza afloat. In the early 2000s, recovered

and thriving, the Lavazza family slowed and looked

at the conditions of farm workers abroad who

make blends possible. What they found was

not always pretty, and the family started

the Giuseppe and Pericle Lavazza

Foundation and a coffee project

called ¡Tierra!, dedicated to

raising the standards of living

in developing nations.

CAFFÈ

DavidW. Brown