Two brothers, a Parma village and a medal in Rome.

Mutti began in 1899 in Piazza di Basilicanova, a village in the municipality of Montechiarugolo, south-east of Parma. The company dates its start to the year the brothers Marcellino and Callisto Mutti began processing tomatoes there, under the name Fratelli Mutti; Unioncamere’s register of Italian historic businesses says they built on tomato-growing knowledge from their uncle Giovanni. In 1909, the company says, Marcellino’s son Ugo Mutti persuaded his father to set up a small factory to make tomato extract.

The mark that still identifies the brand arrived early. In 1911 the company registered its “two lions” trademark, the same year it won a gold medal at the international exhibition in Rome, English Wikipedia says, citing the Gazzetta di Parma. The company says the two lions on its label stand face to face guarding that 1911 medal, and that they let customers who could not read ask simply for “the brand with the two lions.” In 1925, both the company and Unioncamere say, Mutti won a Palme d’Or at the Paris world’s fair.

The business grew with the Parma tomato industry. English Wikipedia, citing a 2018 book on the Italian food sector by Guia Beatrice Pirotti, says Mutti began making double-concentrated paste in 1922 and from 1927 bought other preserving businesses; the food-museum network of the province of Parma lists Noceto, acquired in 1927, among a string of plants that followed. The historic factory at Piazza was linked to the Parma–Traversetolo tramway, English Wikipedia adds, citing the rail magazine Tutto Treno & Storia.

A thimble cap, a fine pulp and a pair of restyled lions.

Mutti’s best-known piece of design is a tube. In 1951 Ugo Mutti launched tomato concentrate in an aluminium tube, so that cooks could squeeze out only what they needed. Its cap was a red thimble — Unioncamere describes it as bakelite — that could be used for sewing, and the pack became known as the “thimble tube,” English Wikipedia says, citing L’Espresso. The Museo del Marchio Italiano, a museum of Italian trademarks, says the tube carried a new logo built from a signature and a tomato.

The second landmark was a product. In 1971 Mutti launched polpa, finely chopped tomato pulp; the company calls itself the first to make it, and says the restaurant guide Gault&Millau named its finely chopped tomatoes the best in Europe in 1994. Later lines followed, including ready-made sauces and, in 2020, a purée called “Sul Campo,” made beside the fields in a mobile factory, the company says.

The label has been redrawn several times around the same animals. According to the Museo del Marchio Italiano, early labels carried the abbreviated “Fratelli Mutti” name and two gold lions on a red ground, sometimes with palm branches and the word Basilicanova, and the 1911 awards were stamped on the cans. When the company became a joint-stock company in 1979, the logo changed to a red rectangle with one curved side, two yellow lions and the name. In 2001 the Milan agency Vittorio Mancini & Associati modernised it with the payoff “Solo pomodoro. Per passione,” and in 2013 the Milan agency Robilant Associati refined the lions and shortened the payoff to “Solo pomodoro,” built into the logo itself. The company says the word Parma at the foot of the label stands for its city of origin and the tomato-growing area around it.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make the seasonings, stocks, tomatoes and sauces that sit behind a meal, and they come from Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States: Maggi, Knorr, Mutti, Cirio, Patak’s, Lee Kum Kee and Old El Paso. Brands in this part of the store cupboard 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 shop to a supermarket shelf on another continent.

A sauce or stock brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a jar, a cube, a tin, a name and the kitchen 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 products are actually made 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 products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A fourth generation, a Belgian partner and three plants.

Mutti has stayed a family company. Francesco Mutti, of the fourth generation, became chief executive in 1994, Unioncamere says. In November 2016 the Belgian investment company Verlinvest bought a 24.5% minority stake, Just Food reported at the time; the company says the remaining 75.5% is held by Red Lions, the Mutti family holding company.

Production is in Italy, at three sites the company names. The historic headquarters and factory are at Montechiarugolo. In 2013 Mutti began working with Fiordagosto, a processor at Oliveto Citra in the province of Salerno, and bought its plant in 2016; the company says it specialises in southern varieties such as plum tomatoes for peeled tomatoes and cherry tomatoes. In November 2017 Mutti bought the plant of the CO.PAD.OR cooperative at Collecchio, near Parma, at a court auction, the Parma edition of la Repubblica reported; the company says it has since been absorbed into Mutti S.p.A. and can handle more than 300,000 tonnes a year. Mutti says it processes only Italian tomatoes, and since 2000 it has given growers an annual award, the Pomodorino d’Oro.

Growth since then has come largely abroad. Mutti opened its first foreign office, in France, in 2013, followed by sales companies in the United States, the Nordic countries, Australia, Germany and, in 2024, the United Kingdom, the company says. The trade site Italianfood.net reported in May 2025 that revenue reached €703 million in 2024, about 59% of it outside Italy, from some 565,000 tonnes of tomatoes processed, and the Gazzetta di Parma reported in May 2026 that revenue rose to €777 million in 2025.

For a design guide, Mutti shows how one heraldic device — two lions and a medal — can be redrawn by successive agencies for more than a century without losing its recognition. Compare Cirio, the Turin canning pioneer, and Barilla, its Parma neighbour in pasta. For this guide we use a tomato red, a lion gold and a deep sugo red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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