Carpigiani Brand Guidelines: The Bologna Maker of the 1946 Autogelatiera

Two brothers and a machine for Bologna’s gelato shops.

Carpigiani is a Bologna name. Biblioteca Salaborsa, the city library whose online chronology records Bologna’s history year by year, credits the design of the company’s first machine to Bruto Carpigiani, a technician and designer who had been technical director of the Bologna machinery maker ACMA and who is credited there with a mechanism known as the “ruota a zeta.” Bruto worked out the design of the Autogelatiera, an automatic machine for making gelato; his brother Poerio Carpigiani took it into production from 1946. Italian Wikipedia dates the start of the business, as Carpigiani Bruto, to 5 April 1946, and English Wikipedia notes a patent filed in Bologna that year with Poerio named as inventor and Carpigiani as holder. The Los Angeles Times, reporting from the company’s school in 2010, wrote that Carpigiani had sold gelato-making equipment since 1945, so the sources differ by a year.

The machine was a commercial product from the start. La Repubblica’s business supplement Affari & Finanza reported in April 2017 that Carpigiani Bruto Macchine Automatiche put the Autogelatiera on sale in 1946 as a cream-coloured machine, and that within a few years it had become the “must” of the gelato shop, as the red Berkel slicer was for the delicatessen. The same report said some Autogelatiere were still at work, kept on show by their owners as a sign that their gelato is made fresh. Italian Wikipedia, citing the company’s own history, says about 22,500 were built between 1946 and 1990.

The company outgrew the city centre. Salaborsa says that in 1969 it moved from Via Parigi, in central Bologna, to a larger factory at Anzola dell’Emilia, on the Via Emilia west of the city, where it is still based. At the entrance Poerio Carpigiani placed a statue of the Bologna athlete Ondina Valla, Olympic champion at Berlin in 1936, made in 1938 by her brother, the sculptor Rito Valla; Salaborsa calls the statue the symbol of Carpigiani.

Cattabriga, Ali Group and a gelato university.

Carpigiani grew by setting up abroad and by buying other makers. Italian Wikipedia, citing the company’s history, says Carpigiani France was set up in 1954 and Coldelite was founded in the United States in 1964. In 1971, both Wikipedias say, Carpigiani bought Cattabriga, the older Bologna maker which, Salaborsa says, had held since 1927 the first patent for an automatic batch freezer; La Repubblica described Cattabriga’s Motogelatiera of 1927 as the first with an electric motor.

In 1989 Carpigiani became part of Ali Group, the foodservice-equipment group that La Repubblica described in 2017 as a Piedmontese multinational controlled by the Berti family. Ali Group’s own history page lists Carpigiani, Cattabriga and Coldelite among its 1989 acquisitions. In the 1990s, La Repubblica reported, Carpigiani added the Swiss maker Ott-Freezer, Promag of Milan, Sencotel of Spain and the Italian GBG. In 2017 the paper counted five production sites on three continents: Bologna and Forlì in Italy, Valencia in Spain, Zhongshan in China and Buenos Aires in Argentina.

The range has widened beyond artisan gelato. Both Wikipedias, citing the company, list batch freezers, pasteurisers and machines for soft serve, frozen yogurt, shakes, frozen drinks and whipped cream. La Repubblica wrote in 2017 that Carpigiani made half of the world’s gelato machines and that 55 per cent of artisan gelato machines in Italy carried its name, a name that, the paper added, many people mistake for a brand of ice cream.

The company also teaches the craft. Carpigiani Gelato University opened at Anzola in 2003; in 2010 the Los Angeles Times found students there from more than 100 countries, learning at the headquarters on the Via Emilia that gelato is at its best as it comes out of the batch freezer. The Gelato Museum Carpigiani, inaugurated at the headquarters in September 2012, covers about 1,000 square metres with 20 original machines and some 10,000 historical images and documents, its website says. In May 2013 the school and the SIGEP fair of Rimini held the first Gelato World Tour, a travelling competition for artisan gelato makers, in Rome, La Repubblica reported.

How ice cream machine makers present themselves.

Ice cream machine makers sell equipment that most customers only glimpse from the other side of a counter. The trade’s visual language is stainless steel: batch freezers, the mantecatori from which fresh gelato is squeezed out, and soft-serve machines whose taps pour a single flavour or a twist of two. Wired, writing about one soft-serve machine in 2021, summed up the basic process: liquid mix fed in through a hopper and frozen in a spinning barrel. The Los Angeles Times, reporting from a gelato school near Bologna in 2010, heard instructors say that gelato is at its best as it comes out of the machine.

The finished product goes on show. The Gelato Museum Carpigiani’s account of the trade traces how the cone made gelato easy to eat in the street and how gelato moved out of tubs and into glass display cases, so that the shop counter itself became a stage for colour and texture.

Teaching is part of the pitch. Carpigiani opened a gelato school at its headquarters outside Bologna in 2003, and the Los Angeles Times found students there from more than 100 countries; Middleby describes a Technical Development Center for its Taylor brand used for research, customer demonstrations and training. Makers present their machines in working kitchens as much as in catalogues.

Trade fairs are the other stage. SIGEP World, held every January at the Rimini Expo Centre in Italy, presents itself as an international event for gelato, pastry, chocolate, coffee, bakery and pizza, with equipment and technology among its exhibitor sectors; La Repubblica reported that the first Gelato World Tour, in 2013, was organised with SIGEP. The guides that follow set out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A cream machine and a statue at the gate.

Carpigiani’s public face is built as much from places and objects as from a mark: the factory on the Via Emilia, the Valla statue at its gate, the museum’s historic machines and the school’s classrooms. Its machines also sit in a public collection: Salaborsa’s pages show Carpigiani and Cattabriga machines in Bologna’s Museo del Patrimonio Industriale, the city’s museum of industrial heritage.

The business today is the Carpigiani Group, part of Ali Group; the museum’s website carries both names. In 2017 its then chief executive, Andrea Cocchi, told La Repubblica that the company had to “build the customer” before building more machines, by helping gelato makers offer better and newer gelato — the idea behind the school, the museum and the Gelato World Tour. The same report described “Shop in the Shop,” a gelato corner of four square metres built around a single machine, the Rady, for cafés and shops. The museum itself tells the longer story of gelato, from snow wells and street carts to the batch freezer and the glass display case.

For a design guide, Carpigiani shows how an equipment maker can build its identity around the craft its machines serve: a school, a museum and a competition carry the name further than any nameplate. Compare Cattabriga, the older Bologna maker it bought in 1971, and Frigomat, another Italian maker of gelato machines. For this guide we use gelato cream, espresso brown and pistachio green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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