A seller in the market squares, a company in Lombardy.

Franchi Sementi dates itself to 1783. The company’s own history says it was created that year by Giovanni Franchi, who sold his seed “di piazza in piazza” — from one town square to the next — and that the business reached an industrial scale from 1920 and, in 1960, moved to a mechanised system for selecting and packing seed, combined with research and trials. Those dates come from the company’s own account.

The place where it began is named by the firms that sell it abroad. Seeds from Italy, its American importer in Lawrence, Kansas, says on its website that Giovanni Franchi started selling seed around the market squares of Parma from a horse-drawn cart; in a text that counts 235 years from 1783, it describes the company as family-owned, with Giampiero Franchi at its head and modern facilities near Bergamo. The Worm That Turned, a British retailer, tells the same story.

The company’s base today is in Lombardy. Its contact page gives an operating address at Grassobbio, in the province of Bergamo, and a registered office in Milan, under the name Franchi Sementi SpA. It sells through shops rather than directly to gardeners: its FAQ says private buyers can find its products only at retailers, and that the company is set up to export both within Europe and beyond. Its range covers vegetable, herb, flower, legume and lawn seed and bulbs, in lines the website lists as Golden Line, Linea Europea, Virimax and Magnum e Mercurio.

Seed from its own stock plants.

Franchi presents itself as a producer, not only a packer. The company says its seed production starts from stock seed plants it owns and covers 90 percent of its range; that every lot is tested for germination in an in-house laboratory, several times a year; and that hundreds of lots are sown each year in a trial field to check that each variety is true to type, with a record and photographs kept for every lot. It also says its seed is stored at a constant temperature and humidity. Seeds from Italy describes the supply differently: it says Franchi buys 70 percent of its seed from Italian farmers, whom someone from the company visits regularly.

The company also says it is a registered maintainer — “conservatrice in purezza” at European Community level — of numerous vegetable varieties, a role it describes as taking on part of the work of keeping biodiversity alive. In 2011 the American farm magazine Farm Show quoted Daniel Nagengast, then Franchi’s exclusive North American distributor, as saying that the varieties he carried were almost all open-pollinated regional types, which gardeners can grow out and save seed from. Nagengast credited the company’s germination standards, and its policy of growing out every batch of seed, for the brand’s reputation among his customers.

Packaging is part of the pitch. Franchi says all its packs — envelopes, boxes and jars — are designed to look attractive and modern, so that individual varieties are easy to pick out at the point of sale. Its Doppia Busta, or “double packet,” line has been on the market for more than 30 years, the company said in January 2026, when it built most of its stand at the IPM Essen trade fair in Germany around it, returning as an exhibitor after years of showing only at Italian fairs.

Seed houses and their packets.

The seven brands in this group are all garden seed names: D.T. Brown, Moles Seeds, Franchi, De Bolster, Veseys, Seeds of Change and True Leaf Market. Seed companies in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger horticultural groups, and a single name can reach gardeners through a printed catalogue, a garden-centre rack or a website.

A seed brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a packet, a catalogue and a name, because the company behind it may have changed hands, moved premises or changed where its seed is grown and packed. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its seed is grown, cleaned 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 seed comes from and how its packets have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A packet that reads like a map.

The back of a Franchi packet is a small information system. The company’s own guide to its Linea Europea packets explains that coloured dots mark three climate zones — blue for cooler areas, red for Mediterranean ones and yellow for the Middle East — so that northern Italy reads blue and southern Italy red; that sowing and harvest months are given in Roman numerals beside the dot for each zone; that the variety description appears in several major languages; and that a small marker can be cut from the packet and pushed into the soil as a row label. The lot number is stamped on when the seed is packed.

Recent ranges look backwards. In October 2024 Franchi introduced a Vintage line of paper packets for twelve vegetable varieties that, the company says, already appeared in its 1928 catalogue, among them a silver-ribbed chard and the round chicory of Verona, with a cardboard display and illustrations that recall the packs sold in those years. In October 2025 it added twelve heritage flowers, such as celosia and scabious, in paper envelopes. In Britain the range is sold by Seeds of Italy, of Harrow in north-west London, which describes itself as the importer of the Franchi brand and lists a “Vintage 1928” seed range.

For a design guide, Franchi Sementi shows how a seed packet can carry a whole growing calendar in colour and numerals, and how an old catalogue can become a new product line. Compare Vilmorin, the Paris seed house, and Suttons in Britain. For this guide we use a garden green, tomato red and seed cream with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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