A woman’s shop, a grandson’s factory.

Matilde Vicenzi is named after a real person. Matilde Vicenzi started the business in 1905 at San Giovanni Lupatoto, a town just south of Verona, according to both the company and Italian Wikipedia. The company describes “a small bakery with an attached pastry shop”; Italian Wikipedia, citing a 2007 profile in the magazine Specchio Economico, calls it a small shop selling bread, pastries and groceries. The company presents her today as a symbol of women’s entrepreneurship.

Italian Wikipedia says the shop bought its first machine for piped biscuits in 1912. When Matilde died in 1944, her son Angelo took over and, after an automatic biscuit machine made by Melzi arrived in 1946, gave up bread. His children joined him: Mario ran sales and deliveries, and Giuseppe ran production. The company’s own timeline tells the same story from Giuseppe’s side, describing him as Matilde’s grandson, saying the Melzi machine was a gift he received at fourteen and that he took charge of the business in 1963.

In the 1960s and 1970s the workshop became a factory. The company says Giuseppe bought a plant at San Giovanni Lupatoto and specialised in the amaretto, later adding the Vicenzovo savoiardo, or ladyfinger. Italian Wikipedia says that in 1970 the firm changed its name from Matilde Vicenzi & Figli to Vicenzi Biscotti S.p.A. and that its first automated line had arrived in 1968. The business is still at San Giovanni Lupatoto: the company names Vicenzi S.p.A., on the town’s Via Forte Garofolo, as its headquarters.

Amaretti, savoiardi and the Millefoglie.

The puff pastry arrived in 1975. After a trip to Japan, both the company and Italian Wikipedia say, Giuseppe Vicenzi bought a machine suited to laminated dough; the company says it was adapted to Italian pastry, and the result was the Millefoglie di Matilde, a puff-pastry (sfoglia) biscuit. The company now groups these as filled and unfilled “sfoglie” alongside its amaretti, savoiardi, assorted pastries, single portions for vending machines and bases for cafés and restaurants.

The company says that Matilde’s own recipe book, inherited by Giuseppe, is still kept and is still used as a source for products such as the Vicenzovo savoiardi, the amaretti and the Millefoglie; that is its claim. For the 300-gram Vicenzovo pack it says it uses sugar from Italia Zuccheri and stone-ground Italian wheat flour. In 2017, it says, it added gluten-free and lactose-free lines, including a gluten-free Vicenzovo.

Market figures come from the company itself. In a news release dated August 2026 it said that in the first half of 2026 Vicenzovo held 28% of the Italian savoiardi market, its amaretti 22% of theirs, and the Matilde Vicenzi sfoglie 28% by volume and 30% by value; it described the group as the third-largest maker of industrial pastry in Italy, with consolidated turnover of €168 million in 2025. We have not seen independent market data to confirm those shares.

The brand has long tied itself to Verona. The company says its sponsorship of the opera festival at the Arena di Verona began in 1980 and lasted more than forty years; in 2005 it marked its centenary with a photographic exhibition in Piazza Bra and a book, Verona nel cuore di Vicenzi, with pictures by photographers including Carl De Keyzer of Magnum, according to Italian Wikipedia.

Biscuits and the houses that make them.

The seven brands in this group all make biscuits, and they come from four countries: Kambly from Switzerland, Delacre from Belgium, Lambertz and Griesson from Germany, Lazzaroni and Matilde Vicenzi from Italy, and De Beukelaer, whose story runs through Belgium and Germany. Biscuit makers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family bakeries that still carry a founder’s name to large groups that own several brands and plants, and a single name can move from one kind of owner to another over a century or more.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried by a tin, a wrapper and a recipe it promises has not changed, while the company behind the name may have been sold, merged or renamed more than once, and the biscuits themselves may be baked a long way from the town on the packet. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its signature products and where they are baked — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand and a group.

Matilde Vicenzi is one brand inside a larger group. In 2005, the company’s centenary year, Vicenzi bought the bakery-products business of Parmalat, which had collapsed in 2003, taking over the brands Grisbì and Mr. Day, as FinanzaOnline reported in September 2005; Italian Wikipedia adds that the deal came with four plants and about 400 staff, and that the company then took the name Vicenzi Group. Grisbì, the round filled shortcrust biscuit, has been made since the 1980s and was a Parmalat brand before then; it is a separate brand of the group, not a Matilde Vicenzi product.

The company names three plants, at San Giovanni Lupatoto, Bovolone in the province of Verona and Nusco near Avellino, and says all its plants are in Italy. Italian Wikipedia also lists a fourth, at Fiorenzuola d’Arda, from the ring-cake maker Maradini, which Vicenzi bought in 2003; the current website does not name it. Neither source says which product is made where.

The family remains in charge, the company says: Giuseppe Vicenzi, the group’s president, was made a Cavaliere del Lavoro in May 2021, and the company says 2025, its 120th year, brought a generational handover at the top. Italian Wikipedia records that in 2015 the group set up a US sales company in New Jersey, joined Borsa Italiana’s ELITE programme in 2016, hired an outside manager and looked for a minority private-equity partner; it does not say one was found. The brand’s look changed in 2010–2011, when, Italian Wikipedia says, a portrait of Matilde was put at the front of the logo as signature and icon; the company says the logo was revisited again in 2023.

For a design guide, Matilde Vicenzi shows how a founder’s name and face can carry a brand long after a family workshop has become an industrial group. Compare Balocco, another Italian pastry shop turned biscuit maker, and Loacker. For this guide we use bordeaux, baked gold and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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