Cream of the crop Sammontana

Building a sustainable future Unilever

cream of the crop

Think of quality ice cream, and you think of Italy. Philip Yorke reports on Sammontana, a company that is at the pinnacle of the gelato industry in Europe and is now setting new standards for greener production processes.

The story of Sammontana began more than 70 years ago when Romeo Bagnoli, a father of six children, established a café with an ice cream bar in a village near Florence. He subsequently bought a dairy in the village of Sammontana. News of his passion for ice cream quickly spread throughout Italy, creating a demand which sees no sign of abating.

Today, Sammontana is a large, Italian blue-chip company that employs more than 1,000 people and operates four state-of-the-art production sites in Italy, as well as a modern logistics hub in Montelupo in the province of Florence. Sammontan produces more than one billion portions of frozen ice cream and confectionery every year.

The company is famous for its classic ice cream and confectionery brands: Sammontana. TreMarie, II Pasticcere, Mongele and Bon Chef. All these products offer a unique taste, born of the intuition, care and passion of the founder, for which the company is renowned throughout Europe.

Delivering ‘greener’ ice cream

Italy’s market leading producer of ice cream and frozen confectionery saw a 3 per cent growth in turnover to €362 million and an EBITDA stable at €45.7 million in 2017. The company generates over 40 per cent of its turnover from the frozen croissant sector where it is the clear market leader with its well-known Tre-Marie brand.

Sammontana has pioneered a dedicated green conversion programme which is aimed at significantly reducing the environmental impact of its processes. This includes adopting the most advanced packaging solutions, the increasingly efficient use of water and energy, the effective selection of raw materials and innovative waste and logistics management.

Pioneering eco-design

Thanks to its collaboration with the University Consortium of Applied Research (CURA) of the University of Padua, the company has adopted an operating procedure and customised models of ‘Eco-Design’ to evaluate more sustainable design alternatives. “We identified the production processes that create a greater environmental impact, on which

improvements could be made” said Sammontana’s Director General for industrial and environmental affairs, Carlo Felici Chizzolini. “From raw materials to packaging, to production phases, up to distribution, and the use and disposal of containers, every aspect of our day-to-day operations is considered”.

The result of all this activity can be seen in the new ice cream brand, ‘Prima Ricetta’ which has now been in production since 2018, and which from conception has represented the ultimate in eco-friendly manufacturing, with 100 per cent Italian ingredients, no dyes and with only natural flavours.

Production optimisation

The production planning processes involved in the running of a large and complex company like Sammontana requires sophisticated processing tools that are not only powerful and refined, but also capable of transforming information into data for everyday business operations. However, they must also be flexible and scaleable to respond to ongoing changes in the marketplace.

These considerations become even more important when a company that makes a seasonal product such as Sammontana is concerned. For these reasons, as early as 2004, Sammontana turned to the Cegeka consultancy of Italy, in order to review and advise on production planning processes and to identify the most suitable tools to improve production management. As a result, the company adopted the ‘My-Plan’ solution proposed by Cegeka, which is focused on estimating stock-holding scenarios, in order to integrate it with the latest logistics management software.

Enrico Franchi, Sammontana’s IT Manager said, “The new system has allowed us to have a greater capacity to react to market trends by providing precise information on future movements in demand.

This is largely thanks to its considerable processing capacity. The system can in fact be easily fed with data coming from various company databases and so we are able to manage the many necessary operational parameters.”

In 2011 the migration of plants also involved the acquisition of the Gran Milano Group, which was then operating on a single management system. Today, with just one server installed in Sammontana’s headquarters, the company is able to monitor the situation of the entire group, from the production planning of plants, to the monitoring of integrated logistics and distribution activities.

Currently the implementation of the ‘My-Plan’ system from Cegeka allows Sammontana to carry out the global planning of all its factories, both for ice cream products and for its frozen bakery lines, by dialoguing with the management and logistics systems.

“These schedules can now be handled in a few minutes because ‘My-Plan’ allows a processing speed that is enormously superior to that of standard management systems. My-Plan also allows us to tackle one of the critical problems typical of seasonal production, which consists of optimising stock levels.

“With ice cream for example, we try to work with limited security stocks because the cost of immobilisation is high. It is also very important to be able to guarantee the ‘shelf-life’ of the products for consumers” commented Giancarlo Castaldo, head of Ice Cream Planning at Sammontana Italia. n