(About us)

Food & Beverage marketing agency

Erbacipollina is a marketing and communication agency that has worked exclusively in Food & Beverage since 2010. It was founded in Imola, where its headquarters still stands. Today it has three offices, Imola, Rome and Milan, with forty professionals between core team and permanent collaborators.

(History)

It all started with a pack of pasta

Erbacipollina was born in 2010, at a table, in a restaurant in the centre of Imola. Around that table sat Beatrice Vernocchi, Roberto Maiolini, a Michelin-starred chef and a few sommelier friends who genuinely knew food and wine.

Beatrice came from a long career in generalist communication and marketing agencies, Roberto from the digital world. They already had the agency craft in hand, built on categories that had nothing to do with food. That is how they arrived at food.

What set everything off was a pack of pasta. Yet another pack with no identity, unable to give value to a product that deserved more. It sat in the middle of the table for the whole evening.

The conversation started there and never stopped. Whoever sat around that table knew food from the inside, whether they cooked it, produced it or communicated it. Everyone saw the same problem from a different angle. It only took looking outside Italy to see what was missing.

In 2010 the comparison was unforgiving. In the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic visual identities of those years, the product stood out. Around it there was clarity, space, a legible hierarchy. That restraint made the value visible instead of smothering it. On our packaging, by contrast, everything piled up. The banner, the medal, the nod to tradition, the wheat field in the background, the font that mimics handwriting. A pack that says everything at once and shows nothing.

What emerged that evening was a shared drive, to give new life to Italian food brands starting from how they present themselves. A well-made product, with a true story inside, that in front of the person choosing it was worth less than what it actually was.

From there came the choice and the bet, to open a communication and marketing agency dedicated solely to Food & Beverage. In 2010 no other agency in Italy was vertical on food. Colleagues at generalist agencies called it madness. Giving up every other sector was considered unsustainable. But the reasoning was simple. To truly understand a sector you have to live it all year round. To live it all year round you have to stop doing anything else.

Today that madness has become our expertise. No side businesses, no clients taken outside the sector to pad revenue. One single market, a sensitivity built project after project.

(The name)

The name says the trade

Chives are the ingredient a chef uses to elevate a dish in taste and appearance at the same time. With a single gesture they work on the substance and on how that substance presents itself. That is the difference between a good dish and a dish someone will remember.

A food brand works the same way. It is worth what it is and what it manages to convey about itself. The two things cannot be separated without losing something. An excellent product that nobody recognises remains just a product. Sooner or later only the price does the talking.

We chose this name in 2010. Since then it has remained the shortest definition of what we do.

(What we do)

The full communication of a food brand

We have analysed markets, listened to producers, toured points of sale, tasted products, studied consumers. We work on positioning, packaging, tone of voice and channels, because a brand's value does not live in a single place and must be recognisable everywhere.

We are consultants, not executors. When our opinion differs from the brief we say so, backed by the data we have.

(The people)

The people

Today the agency counts forty people, between core team and permanent collaborators. We are connoisseurs of Italian food and wine before we are professionals. When we talk about a product, we know what we are talking about.

When a new client comes on board, the first thing we ask is to try the product lines we will be working on. Before asking ourselves how to tell a product's story, we want to know how it is made, with what raw materials, what it tastes like, what it pairs with. For us that firsthand knowledge is the foundation of the work, not an extra step.

The table this agency was born around in 2010 has never really left. Only what ends up on it changes. The biggest problem for the people who work here remains the extra pounds, if you let yourself get carried away.

(The tone)

Sensitive to food, but rational to the point of obsession

We get moved by a family recipe. Thirty seconds later we ask for the sell-out data. The two things coexist perfectly well. Food is memory, territory and identity. At the same time it is a category with a rotation rate, a price and a buyer who decides whether a product gets listed or stays out.

A sensitivity without numbers remains an opinion. Numbers without sensitivity have never tasted anything.

(Verticality)

Vertical on Italian Food & Beverage

On the surface, Italian food changes every day. Trending ingredients, packaging materials, nutritional claims, product formulations all shift. In the foundations it changes far more slowly. That is where handed-down recipes live, a brand's recognisability, trust built over time, the purchase habit that repeats itself on supermarket shelves and passes from one generation to the next almost without anyone noticing.

Our job is to stand exactly at that point, between what changes and what has to stay. To understand which innovations make a brand grow without distorting it. To recognise which signals anticipate a real transformation rather than being trends destined to disappear with the season that produced them.

Filtering requires sector experience. Our Food Sensitivity comes from exactly that, from the Italian food calendar, from conversations with retail buyers, from discussions with product managers, from meetings with the companies that every day turn raw materials, expertise and tradition into products that enter people's homes.

(Numbers)

Our size, in numbers.

Years vertical on Food & Beverage, since 2010.

200+

Italian food brands.

Professionals between core team and permanent collaborators.

Offices, Imola (headquarters), Rome and Milan.

(Brands we work with)