Bertazzoni_-_Video_Complete

It's a long story. It started two centuries ago in 1882 when the company was established to manufacture scales for the cheese industry. As you know, we are in the Emilia region where Parmesan is produced, and one of the possible markets at that time was the cheese industry. It then evolved at the turn of the century in the early 1900s into the manufacturing of wood-burning cookers. This was a great innovation for the times and it brought us into the world of mass production after World War I under the principle of producing for the masses. When the war came, everything was seized and destroyed, and my father had to start from scratch again, basing it on technology, culture, and design. These are the things on which my father rebuilt the company. By the mid-50s, the company started to have a better market background, and this is when gas was introduced. The change of technology is a big challenge because you have a totally new world in front of you, and I think that our engineering skills, derived from the family culture and from the culture of Emilia-Romagna that is very strong in engineering, certainly helped us through that process. When we talk about a company that spans over generations and over a difficult period like we have, the experience in the past is certainly something that has a value, and this is creating the base for a sustainable business.

Taking over as a fifth generation is certainly a matter of pride, but this also is a matter of responsibility. What I think is very important in my role is to understand what is happening around and what can be conveyed into the product. Whenever we conceive the product, we have a lot of constraints and demands coming from the end user, from the market, from manufacturing, from the suppliers, and this adds a lot to the complexity. So we build up a lot of complexity into the product concept that then has to be eliminated. This is where a subtraction process comes into play, where we eliminate all the clutter, the things that are not necessary. We come to a point where the product can be manufactured efficiently, where it works perfectly, where it delivers the results it's meant for. But it can become a very boring product, and this is what we want to avoid. We always want to add something to the product that makes it exciting, but we can do that only at the end of the process because functionality and quality are extremely important. This is where Italians are striving every day. The first thing I'm focused on in terms of what we do is the quality of the product, the design of the product. I don't like referring clients to any product that I am not certain performs very well. So in terms of the way it heats, in terms of the way it reacts, the craftsmanship of Bertazzoni to me is one of the most important features. The worst thing that can happen to a designer is to have callbacks on a product that's not quality, and I never have a callback on a Bertazzoni ever.

Cooking is one of the best ways to relax, and it's one of the best ways to gather the family, one of the best ways to gather with friends. This is part of the tradition that is still visible in a product like ours. So food culture is based very much on tradition, but the product has to follow the times where we live. It's very important that food culture stays as an anchor for product development. So the product is evolving rapidly, but basing on very solid principles.

The role of the kitchen ambient has evolved from what we could call a secluded, utilitarian room where you were supposed to prepare food. Now we see that lifestyle has evolved and the kitchen is merging again into the living room. When the kitchen is merging into the living room, we have a new challenge for the products. The product must be nice, must be beautiful, can be shown. And so the appearance has become more important. This is where we see the future of Bertazzoni — to create exciting new products and evolve them into high quality, into respect for the environment, into respect for the end user that will use our product for almost a lifetime.

The quest for sustainable growth and environmental impact is very important nowadays. What I can see about our industry is not certainly a big change in materials, but an improvement in functionality. It will be a sum of incremental improvements and we will get to amazing results. For example, the use of electronics into the product — if we focus our attention and use the potential of an electronic board or a chip in reducing, for example, the use of energy, we can get to amazing results.