Grom Brand Guidelines: The 2003 Turin Gelateria Bought by Unilever, Now With Magnum

A newspaper clipping, two school friends and a shop in Turin.

Grom began with a newspaper clipping. In 2003, the Corriere della Sera reported in 2015, Guido Martinetti, a wine-maker by training, showed his former school classmate Federico Grom, a financial analyst, an interview in which Carlo Petrini, the president of Slow Food, complained that it had become impossible to eat gelato the way it used to be made. Martinetti asked why the two of them should not do it themselves, choosing the raw materials. A week later, the newspaper said, the idea had become a plan.

The first shop opened in Piazza Paleocapa in Turin a few months later. Italian Wikipedia, citing La Repubblica, dates the opening to May 2003, and English Wikipedia gives 18 May 2003. The company took its name from Federico Grom’s surname, Italian Wikipedia says, and the operating company, Gromart, still gives Piazza Paleocapa as its address on the brand’s website.

The phrase attached to the brand from the start was “il gelato come una volta,” gelato as it once was, which Italian Wikipedia gives as its slogan. In 2012 the founders told their own story in a book published by Bompiani, whose title translates as Grom: the story of a friendship, some gelato and many flowers. The company’s current history page repeats the outline: Grom was born in Turin in 2003 from the dream of two friends, to find the finest ingredients and add nothing else.

Seasonal fruit, a farm and a central laboratory.

Grom built its name on ingredients. In 2015 the Corriere della Sera summed up its approach as seasonal products, raw materials from Slow Food presidia, natural thickeners such as carob-seed flour and attention to sustainability, and quoted Martinetti saying the company would keep using ingredients from its own organic farm, Mura Mura, and keep production in Turin.

Production still sits near the city. The company says its gelato is blended in a single central laboratory at Mappano, in the province of Turin, without bases or semi-finished products, using Italian milk, bourbon vanilla, chocolate and cocoa from Venezuela and Ecuador, and Italian fruit. It says the liquid mix then rests for five days before it is churned each day in the shop, and that its shops usually carry between 16 and 20 flavours, including classics and seasonal ones. The company names chocolate in three versions, a pistachio blended from nuts of different origins and ripeness, a strawberry sorbet made with more than 55 per cent fruit, and a lemon sorbet made with the Limone Femminiello Siracusano, a lemon with protected geographical status. The shops also sell granita, frappés, affogato, Sicilian brioche and hot chocolate.

The way the shops were run also drew notice. The Corriere della Sera reported in 2015 that a year earlier Grom had agreed with the main trade unions to plan staff shifts around the weather, with no work when it rained, on condition that wages were not touched, and that staff took a course in meteorology. In Italy most Grom shops are run directly by the company rather than franchised, the company says, which it presents as a way to keep control of the product and the shop experience.

How the category presents itself.

Ice cream, gelato and frozen-yogurt chains sell something that melts within minutes, so much of their identity sits in the shop itself. The counter, the cabinet of flavours, the cone and the cup are the brand’s most visible surfaces, and the companies’ own pages tend to describe their shops, their kitchens and their ingredients before anything else.

Serving style can become a signature. Amorino, the Paris gelato chain, shapes its gelato into a flower with a spatula, according to French Wikipedia, and in 2012 the business magazine Capital described its shops in tobacco tones rather than the bright white then common among its rivals. The guides in this series look at how each chain describes its own counters, cups and cones, in the words the companies publish.

Names carry a lot of the work. Gelato chains may keep Italian flavour names on their menus, as Capital reported of Amorino, and some chains tie their story to one place. Grom, the Turin gelateria, describes its history through a single founding square, Piazza Paleocapa, and a single central laboratory near the city, and says its shops churn the gelato each day.

Ownership is part of the story too. Some chains grow through franchising, some stay with their founders, and others pass into large groups: Unilever announced its purchase of Grom in 2015, and Grom says it has been part of The Magnum Ice Cream Company since 2025. Each guide in this series sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

From Turin to Unilever and The Magnum Ice Cream Company.

Grom grew quickly beyond Turin. By 2015 the Corriere della Sera counted 67 outlets, among them three gelaterie in New York and shops in Osaka, Malibu, Paris and Tokyo. Its shareholders by then included the Illy group, the Qatari Ikram Group and a Japanese company, the newspaper reported.

On 1 October 2015 Unilever announced the purchase of Grom, and Grom says it joined the Unilever group that year. The trade title Just Food reported on 2 October 2015 that the chain then ran more than 60 shops in Italy and abroad, that the terms were not disclosed, that it had been founded in Turin in 2003, and that Grom would continue as a stand-alone unit; the deal followed Unilever’s purchase of the American gelato maker Talenti in December 2014. The Corriere della Sera listed Algida, Cornetto, Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum among Unilever’s ice cream names at the time, and reported that the two founders would keep their operating roles. Italian Wikipedia, citing La Stampa, says Grom stayed autonomous and run by its founders after the sale.

Unilever later separated its ice cream business. English Wikipedia says the division became an independent subsidiary, The Magnum Ice Cream Company, on 1 July 2025, and Euronext announced on 8 December 2025 that the company had listed on Euronext Amsterdam following its separation from Unilever. Grom says it has been part of that company since 2025, while keeping its own recipes and approach to ingredients. On its website the shops are run by Gromart in Turin and the packaged gelato is listed under The Magnum Ice Cream Company in Rome. The company says it now has 57 gelaterie and an international presence.

For a design guide, Grom shows how a short founding story and a plain promise about ingredients can carry a brand into a large group. Compare Ben & Jerry’s, another ice cream brand in The Magnum Ice Cream Company, and Venchi, a chocolate and gelato name from Piedmont. For this guide we use a pistachio green, cocoa, cream and a lemon yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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