A brother, a sister and a converted foundry near Pisa.

Amedei was founded in 1990 at La Rotta, a village in the comune of Pontedera in the province of Pisa, by the siblings Alessio and Cecilia Tessieri, Italian Wikipedia says, citing Forbes in 2009 and several Italian food guides. The same article says the two had previously run a trading business in pastry products, and that they named the new company after their grandmother. The area belongs to what Italian food writers call Tuscany’s “Chocolate Valley,” a cluster of artisan chocolate makers that grew from the 1980s on.

The company’s own history describes a start on a very small scale: in 1990, it says, an old foundry in Pontedera was converted into an artisan workshop of 45 square metres, fitted with old machinery; Il Sole 24 Ore wrote in 2017 that Amedei started out making pralines in a 45-square-metre workshop with one employee, and that the first Amedei-branded bars reached the market in 1998. Italian Wikipedia gives the site as a former cast-iron foundry, adapted and enlarged in 2006, and puts it at about 2,500 square metres, citing the Corriere Fiorentino in 2014.

The decisive step came in 1998. That year, the company says, it released its first bar of Toscano Black 70, and it describes itself as the pioneer of bean-to-bar making in Italy — chocolate made from the bean onwards rather than from bought-in couverture. Italian Wikipedia dates the start of its search for its own beans, and for control of the whole supply chain, to the same year; the business paper Milano Finanza marked the bar’s fifteenth anniversary in November 2013.

Chuao, Porcelana and the Golden Bean.

Amedei’s reputation rests on a handful of single-origin bars made from rare cacao. The company dates the Porcelana to 2000: a bar made from Criollo cacao grown south-west of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, named, it says, for the very white colour of its beans. The Chuao followed in 2001, named after the Venezuelan coastal valley where its cacao is grown. Italian Wikipedia describes a privileged relationship between Amedei and the cacao hacienda at Chuao, citing the Italian food magazine Gambero Rosso in 2001, and notes that the Porcelana has been called one of the most expensive chocolates in the world; the New York Times wrote about it in a 2003 piece on chocolate tasting.

Awards followed, though accounts of them differ. The company says London’s Academy of Chocolate gave its Golden Bean to the Toscano Black 63 in 2008. Italian Wikipedia credits Amedei with Academy awards in 2006, 2007 and 2008. More recently, the company says, the Italian chocolate society Compagnia del Cioccolato gave its Tavoletta d’Oro award to the Toscano Black 70% in 2023 and to the Toscano Black 80% in 2024.

All the making happens in Pontedera, Italian Wikipedia says, citing a 2002 recipe book: roasting, grinding with stone mills, refining and conching in temperature-controlled tanks for about 72 hours. The company gives the same figure — “up to 72 hours” of conching — and lists cacao origins including Venezuela, Peru, Madagascar, Grenada, Trinidad, Ecuador and Ghana. Its wrappers and boxes are not credited to a named designer in the sources we checked; the company says it is moving its packaging to a paper made partly from micronised cocoa-bean shells.

Craft chocolate and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make chocolate, and they come from four countries: Valrhona, Michel Cluizel and Pralus from France, Amedei from Italy, Felchlin from Switzerland, and Guittard and Askinosie from the United States. They sit at different points in the chocolate trade, from names known mainly to pastry kitchens to small makers known mainly by the bar on the shelf.

At one end are couverture houses, whose chocolate is sold in blocks, pistoles and callets to chefs, chocolatiers and bakers as much as to shoppers, and whose brand often reaches the public second-hand, through a restaurant dessert or a patisserie window. At the other end are bean-to-bar makers, who buy cocoa beans, roast and grind them in their own workshop and sell finished bars, and whose identity rests on the farm, the origin and the maker’s name. Many firms sit somewhere between the two, selling to professionals and to the public at once.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its beans come from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a family firm to a water group’s food arm.

Amedei did not stay in its founders’ hands. In August 2017, Il Sole 24 Ore reported, the mineral-water company Ferrarelle agreed to buy 99% of Amedei, taking over the shares acquired in 2015 by the fund Octopus Europe Limited and the remaining part owned by the founder Cecilia Tessieri, who, a company note said, would stay on to guarantee continuity. Ferrarelle’s president, Carlo Pontecorvo, told the paper the group was glad to bring Amedei “completely back to Italy.” The paper put Amedei’s 2016 revenue at €3 million and said about 40% of sales came from abroad.

The company’s own timeline puts it more gently — in 2017, it says, “Ferrarelle rileva Amedei,” Ferrarelle took Amedei over, promising continuity of production and quality. Ferrarelle, which became a Società Benefit in 2021 and belongs to the LGR Holding group, according to Italian Wikipedia, lists Amedei among its companies, and Amedei’s website describes itself as part of the Ferrarelle group. Cecilia Tessieri stayed until the end of 2020 and in 2021 launched a chocolate brand under her own name, Italian Wikipedia says, citing the food site Agrodolce. Since the sale the company has added bars such as the Acero 95, sweetened with maple sugar, which it dates to 2018, and it says it is sold in more than 40 countries; it still describes its chocolate as made in Tuscany.

For a design guide, Amedei shows how a maker can build a name on a few rare origins and keep it through a change of owner. Compare Domori, another Italian maker built on Criollo cacao, and Pralus, a French bean-to-bar house that has also worked with Chuao cacao. For this guide we use cocoa brown, umber and an old gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Amedei’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.