From a South Philadelphia grocery to an importer.

Cento grew out of a family grocery in South Philadelphia. In an obituary published on 9 May 2013, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Walter F. Naedele wrote that after serving as an Army sergeant in the Second World War, Alfred Ciccotelli returned home to help his parents run their grocery store at Seventh and Montrose Streets, two blocks east of the Italian Market, and lived above the shop with them. His parents, the paper said, had emigrated from the regions of Abruzzi and Campania. The company, which calls its founder “Mr. C”, tells a fuller version on its own website: it says he served in the Pacific, rose to staff sergeant and was honourably discharged in October 1946, and that by the time he came home the family store had closed.

The company’s account continues with a sales job. Cento says that around 1950 Ciccotelli was approached by a Philadelphia wholesaler that sold candy and tobacco to local shops, that within a year he had been promoted to sales manager, and that he began introducing Italian specialities to the stores he called on. When the owners decided to cut back on Italian foods and stay with their main candy and tobacco business, the company says, he went out on his own. Cento gives 1962 as the year Alanric Food Distributors was born; the Inquirer obituary says that in 1963 he founded what became the Italian food importer and distributor of Cento Fine Foods, headquartered in West Deptford, New Jersey.

The parent company’s name is a family portrait. The Inquirer reported that Alanric was named for Ciccotelli himself, for his late son Alfred M., his late wife Anna and his son Rick. Rick Ciccotelli, identified by the paper as chief executive of the parent firm, said his father started the business because he had a passion for, and believed in, selling Italian food at a time when, as he put it, it was not as fashionable as it later became. The obituary also noted that Ciccotelli was a founder of a local chapter of the Sons of Italy. He died on 6 May 2013 at his home in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, the paper reported.

Alanric, the family and a stable of labels.

Cento is a brand rather than the name of the company that owns it. Speaking to the Inquirer in 2013, Rick Ciccotelli said Alanric was still the parent company and Cento its brand, “like General Mills and Jell-O”. The family has owned the business since its founding, and the company’s website describes it as family owned and operated across three generations. According to Cento, the second generation arrived when Ciccotelli’s sons Alfred Jr. and Rick joined the business, and it credits Alfred Jr. with the plan to move a premium Italian brand out of the corner grocery and into mainstream supermarkets across the country. Today, the company says, Rick and his daughter Gina lead the company along with other family members.

The paper described Cento as “yellow-labeled” and said it was known above all for its tomato and olive oil products, but Alanric has always handled more than one label. The Inquirer listed Anna pasta, Bellino specialty products such as olive oils, vinegars, minced garlic and roasted peppers, Ferrara and La Florentine candies and cookies, Little Gina’s pastries and Maurizio pasta among the lines the company distributed in 2013.

The company’s headquarters are in West Deptford, New Jersey; the company’s address is on a road named Cento Boulevard. Cento’s website gives its motto as “Just Treat People Right”, which it attributes to the founder, and a consumer line, “Trust Your Family with Our Family”, that ties the brand back to the people who run it. The company also describes itself on its website as “The Official Tomato of The Philadelphia Union”.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on three different shelves of the grocery aisle: olive oil, pancake and baking mix, and the salty snacks of pretzels and potato chips. Each category has its own packaging habits, and a brand’s identity is often carried less by the food itself than by the tin, bottle, box or bag that holds it, and by the name printed across the front.

An olive-oil tin or bottle tends to lean on a family name, a place and a sense of origin. A pancake-mix box is built around a front panel that has to be read at a glance, with a picture of the finished stack and instructions on the side or back. A pretzel or chip bag has to work as a flat, printed surface that is folded, sealed and stacked, so colour, a wordmark and a window or photograph of the contents do much of the work.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the business, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A can that points back to a field.

Cento’s recent communication has leaned on where its products come from. The company’s traceability page describes three programmes, each linked to the lot code printed on a product. Find My Field, Cento says, lets a shopper use the lot code on participating cans of its Certified San Marzano tomatoes to explore the Italian fields connected to their origins. Back to My Boat connects the lot code on participating tuna products to information about fishing vessels, catch locations and fishing methods, and Bottle to Branch links the lot code on a bottle of its Italian extra virgin olive oil to growing regions and olive groves.

The same page names the outside bodies Cento says it works with. It describes Product Attribute Certification, or PAC, as an independent third-party certification programme that verifies the authenticity and traceability of its Certified San Marzano tomatoes through inspections, testing and supply-chain monitoring, and it says a system called Trace Register connects lot data with products. For olive oil, the page points shoppers to the International Olive Council, which it describes as an intergovernmental organisation for olive oil and table olives, and the North American Olive Oil Association, a trade association. In its statement of future goals, the company says it is focusing on sustainability and on bringing traceability to consumers across more of its Italian products.

Those labels have also been tested in court. In May 2026, ABC7 New York and WPVI reported that two California residents had filed a proposed class action in the US District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that Cento’s “Certified San Marzano” labelling was misleading, and that a lawyer for the company called the claim “entirely without merit”.

The label colour is the detail outsiders reach for: the Inquirer introduced the brand to readers in 2013 as “the yellow-labeled Cento”. On its own website the company pairs the brand with the Ciccotelli family story, describing its products as coming from a family-owned business and inviting shoppers to trust their family with its family.

For a design guide, Cento shows how a single label colour and a family story can carry an importer’s house brand from a corner grocery to national supermarket shelves. Compare it with Mutti, the Parma tomato maker, and Bertolli, the olive-oil name from Lucca; Colavita is another family olive-oil business with a base in New Jersey. For this guide we use label yellow and tomato red with basil and deep sauce with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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