A family of bakers from the Zoldo valley.

Colussi dates its story to 1791, when, the company says, a baker named Giacomo Colussi began the family trade in Venice; it also uses the line “Italian excellence since 1911.” Italian Wikipedia repeats the 1791 date but, in a footnote citing a 2000 local history of the Zoldo valley, names the family’s founder as Sante Colussi, an eighteenth-century baker who emigrated to Venice. The family came from Pianaz, in the Val di Zoldo, in the province of Belluno, and kept links there until the Second World War, the same note says.

The business in its modern form began in 1911, when Angelo Colussi opened the family’s first factory in Venice, making bread and biscuits. Italian Wikipedia, which cites the Treccani encyclopedia, says the firm moved to industrial scale from the 1930s under Angelo’s three sons, Alessandro, Giacomo and Alberto; the company’s own timeline adds that it opened 14 shops in that decade.

The move that shaped the company came after the war. Italian Wikipedia dates the transfer to Perugia to 1949, and the company’s timeline places it in the 1950s, led by Giacomo, in a plant it calls modern for its time. Production later moved to nearby Petrignano d’Assisi, which remains the group’s operating headquarters; its registered office is in Milan.

GranTurchese and a run of acquisitions.

The product most associated with the name is GranTurchese, a shortbread biscuit launched in 1955, which Italian Wikipedia calls the company’s symbol product. It is still sold as its own brand within the group, beside biscuits sold under the Colussi name.

From the 1980s Colussi widened its range, first, the company says, into fette biscottate — the dry toasted slices eaten at Italian breakfasts — and crackers. Then it began buying. Its timeline lists the Misura brand from Heinz in 1996; the Audisio pasta brand from CSM in 1998; and in 1999 the Agnesi pasta group from Danone, which brought the Ponte brand too. Italian Wikipedia’s account of Agnesi is more detailed: Danone had sold Agnesi to the bank Paribas in 1997, and Colussi completed the purchase in 1999 together with Banca Commerciale Italiana and Banca Euromobiliare. Agnesi’s historic plant in Imperia made its last pack in December 2016, and its pasta is now made at Fossano, in Piedmont, Italian Wikipedia says.

Agnesi brought the group its strongest documented packaging history. Italian Wikipedia says the Agnesi firm registered its first mark for wrappers on 7 September 1896, and that in the 1920s it introduced a sealed blue pack carrying a sailing ship, which Italian Wikipedia links to the fleet of sailing ships the family once ran to bring in Taganrog durum wheat from Ukraine. In 1985 its television advertisement “Silenzio, parla Agnesi,” made by the Turin agency Canard, won a Golden Lion at the Cannes advertising festival, the same article says. Those are facts about the pasta brand, not about Colussi’s biscuits, but they sit in the same group today.

More purchases followed, according to the company: Sapori of Siena in 2004, with Tuscan cakes and biscuits sold under names including Sapori 1832; an industrial bread maker, Albea 90, in 2006; and a pasta business in Romania, Pangram, in 2007, the year it also agreed to distribute Del Monte fruit in Italy. In 2019 it entered chocolate by buying La Suissa, and in 2024, it says, it acquired Dr. Klaus Karg KG, a bakery-products business that widens its reach abroad.

Biscuits as a national habit.

The seven brands in this group all make biscuits, and all of them come from Italy: Pavesi, Doria, Galbusera, Gentilini, Colussi, Misura and Saiwa. Italian biscuit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner bar to a supermarket shelf.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the breakfast or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually baked and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its biscuits are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still a family group.

Colussi is still run by its founding family. After a reorganisation in 2011, Italian Wikipedia says, the group has been chaired by Angelo Colussi Serravallo, a son of Giacomo. The operating company is Colussi S.p.A., with its registered office in Milan and its main offices at Petrignano d’Assisi.

Its own figures and Wikipedia’s differ slightly. Italian Wikipedia lists six Italian plants — Petrignano d’Assisi, Barberino Tavarnelle, Fossano, Leini, Villanova d’Albenga and Arquata Scrivia — and eleven worldwide, with sales in 80 countries. The group’s website, as checked in October 2026, says it has ten production sites, five of them in Italy, sells in 80 countries and sells 250 million packs a year in Italy, across a range that runs from biscuits and crackers to pasta, sauces, preserved fruit and chocolate. Its current brand list names Colussi, GranTurchese, Misura, Sapori 1832, La Suissa and Agnesi in Italy, Del Monte as a distributed brand, and Antonio De Niro and Ponte for international markets. The sources checked do not say which plant makes which Colussi biscuit.

One trap for anyone searching: the address colussi.it belongs to an unrelated Venice tourism site, not to the biscuit maker, whose site is colussigroup.it. No official logo specification, typeface or colour code for the Colussi brand appears in the sources checked.

For a design guide, Colussi shows a family biscuit name at the head of a group of acquired brands. Compare Mulino Bianco, Barilla’s biscuit brand, and Balocco, another family biscuit maker. For this guide we use a lagoon blue, a brick red and a shortbread cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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