Two confectioners from the Canavese.

Baratti & Milano takes its name from two confectioners from the Canavese, the district north of Turin: Ferdinando Baratti, from Piverone, and Edoardo Milano, from Bollengo, Italian Wikipedia says, citing a Turin newspaper of 1878. In 1858 they opened a confectionery and pastry workshop in Turin on via Dora Grossa, today via Garibaldi, in the years when the city was capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia and, from 1861, briefly of Italy.

The company says it became an official supplier to the royal house of Savoy in 1874, with the right to use the royal arms. On 1 February 1875, it says, it opened a café in the newly built Galleria Subalpina, an arcade off Piazza Castello. Italian Wikipedia, citing the City of Turin’s guide to historic cafés, says it became a meeting place for the city’s bourgeoisie and for public figures including the prime minister Giovanni Giolitti and the economist Luigi Einaudi, later President of the Republic.

In 1905 the business became a joint-stock company, the Società Anonima per Azioni Baratti e Milano, with a factory on Corso Mediterraneo that also made vermouth and aperitifs; in 1906 it registered its trademark and a patent for its Caramella Classica, the company says.

Mirrors, marble and a butterfly wrapper.

The café is the brand’s showpiece. Its present form dates from an enlargement of 1909 designed by Giulio Casanova and the Turin architect Pietro Fenoglio, with interiors by the sculptor Edoardo Rubino — mirrors, marble, bronze, gilding, stucco and mosaics, Italian Wikipedia says. Its customers found their way into literature: the poet Guido Gozzano’s Le golose was inspired by them, and Fruttero & Lucentini set the opening of their crime novel La donna della domenica in its main room. Damaged by wartime bombing, the café reopened after restoration in 1948, and in 1985 Italy’s culture ministry placed the premises and their furnishings under heritage protection.

Two products define the range. The cremino, a three-layered square of gianduja and hazelnut cream, is credited by the company to its founders; Italian Wikipedia dates it to 1858 but notes, citing the Touring Club’s L’Italia del cioccolato of 2004, that the first official documents date only from 1934. The Caramella Classica, a boiled sweet in fruit and herbal flavours, was shown at Turin’s International Exhibition of 1911, the company says, and is known for its twisted “butterfly” wrapper, the incarto a farfalla. The range also includes gianduiotti, rum-filled cuneesi, hazelnut pralines and fruit jellies.

Packaging is part of the story the company tells. It says its centenary in 1958 was marked by an Armando Testa poster in which the Caramella Classica became a hat for the actress Gina Lollobrigida, and it calls its boxes “piccoli capolavori di design” — little masterpieces of design. It also says it selects cocoa at origin, mainly in Central America, with its technicians following fermentation and drying, and that the final processing takes place in its Piedmont plant, with milk from Normandy and Piedmont’s Tonda Gentile hazelnuts.

Chocolate in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

The seven brands in this group all make or sell chocolate, and they come from three countries with distinct chocolate habits: Perugina and Baratti & Milano from Italy, Valor and Blanxart from Spain, and Droste, Verkade and Van Houten from the Netherlands. Each country is known for a different way of using cocoa, and those habits shape how the brands present themselves.

In the Netherlands the story is cocoa powder: the pressed, alkalised “Dutch” cocoa that made a drink of chocolate easy to mix, sold in tins and boxes whose graphics became part of the brand. In Italy it is gianduja, chocolate blended with hazelnut paste and associated above all with Piedmont, alongside pralines and boxed gifts. In Spain it is chocolate a la taza, a thick drinking chocolate served in cafés, often with churros, alongside bars made for melting into it. The names here range from century-old firms now owned by large groups to family companies, and some survive mainly as brands.

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

From Turin to Bra, and into the Elah Dufour group.

The company left Turin in stages. Its Corso Mediterraneo factory was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, it says, and production moved first to via Mombasiglio and then to via Bistagno. A Stampa Sera headline of September 1985 reported that Baratti had changed hands after more than a century; in November 1991 La Stampa reported that it would leave Turin for Bra, in the province of Cuneo, and the company says production moved there in 1992 under the Veneto confectioner Toulà.

In 1999 Baratti & Milano was bought by the Elah Dufour group of Novi Ligure, the company says, and it has been wholly owned by the group since 2000. Elah Dufour was formed in 1982 by the Genoese entrepreneur Flavio Repetto, bringing together Elah, Dufour and the chocolate maker Novi, Italian Wikipedia says; in 2017 Ermenegildo Zegna took a 10% stake, the regional news site enordovest reported, and the group now calls itself Elah Dufour Novi. Italian Wikipedia dates the purchase of the café itself to 2003, from Toulà, followed by a restoration finished the next year. Today the operating company, Baratti & Milano S.r.l., has its registered office and factory in Bra; in July 2025 the local paper Il Corriere di Alba Bra reported building permits for a new production wing there, with 57 staff and revenue above €33 million. In November 2025 La Stampa reported that Baratti & Milano, with the group’s Elah, Dufour and Novi marks, had entered Italy’s register of historic trademarks. The café, which marked its 150th anniversary in February 2025, still trades in the Galleria Subalpina; in January 2023 it entrusted its menu and wine list to the Alciati restaurant family, the food site Dissapore reported.

For a design guide, Baratti & Milano shows how a café interior and a sweet wrapper can carry a brand long after its production has left the city. Compare Domori, another Piedmont chocolate maker inside a larger group, and Perugina. For this guide we use gianduja brown, gilt and a café green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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