A food distributor, a chemist and a wife called Stella.

Star was born in Muggiò, in the Brianza district north of Milan, in 1948. Italian Wikipedia, citing Corriere della Sera, says Regolo Fossati founded it on 19 June that year as STAR Stabilimenti Alimentari Riuniti, having earlier succeeded his father, Fulvio Fossati, at a smaller food business in the same town. The name has a family meaning: Star is the English for Stella, the name of Regolo’s wife, Stella Pogliani, the company says. Corriere della Sera told the same story in 2001, describing Stella as the mother of Danilo Fossati, the son who would build the business.

The product that made the firm was the stock cube. Italian Wikipedia credits its recipe to Giovanni Nughes, a chemist from Santu Lussurgiu in Sardinia who had settled in Brianza. In 2020 the Sardinian newspaper La Nuova Sardegna told his story through his grandson: Nughes had studied pharmacy in Genoa, made his first cubes after the war at a small works in Rebecco sul Naviglio, and then met Regolo Fossati, a Monza businessman who distributed food products. Together, the paper says, they opened a small cube factory at Muggiò and named it after Fossati’s wife. When the firm later built a much larger plant, Nughes gave up his shares in exchange for one lira on every cube produced and sold. Corriere della Sera wrote in 2001 that Star was the first company to make the stock cube in Italy, a product the paper said had until then been Knorr’s alone.

In 1949 Regolo’s son Danilo Fossati joined the business, and the company calls him the real architect of its success. In the 1960s Star moved its headquarters to Agrate Brianza, a few kilometres to the east, where its head office still stands. Corriere della Sera later described Star as one of the symbolic companies of Italy’s postwar economic miracle.

Double broth, ready ragù and tea in filter bags.

The stock cube was sold under the line that became the brand’s best-known slogan: “Doppio Brodo Star,” double broth. Corriere della Sera recalled in 2001 that the slogan came with an easy jingle and the image of a smiling housewife, and Italian Wikipedia says the cube sold in millions of packs. Nughes stayed on as a product developer; Italian Wikipedia credits him with early ready meals such as the Cuoco Mio line, and La Nuova Sardegna lists teas, infusions and vacuum-packed coffee among the products his family says he worked on.

From the 1960s the range spread across the Italian kitchen. The company says that decade brought Gran Ragù, which it describes as the first ready-made sauce produced industrially in Italy, and Star Tea, which it says introduced tea in filter bags to the Italian market, followed by Sognid’oro chamomile, later widened into a range of herbal infusions. In the 1970s came the passata Pummarò and the diced tomato pulp Polpabella, and in the 1980s Star acquired the Tigullio brand, the company says. Italian Wikipedia adds that Star owned the baby-food brand Mellin until 2005, and that in the 1970s and 1980s it made Ciao Crem, a chocolate spread that competed with Nutella; the Ciao Crem name lived on for dessert mixes until 2011.

Later launches kept to convenience. In 2009, the company says, Star introduced Italy’s first ready-made broth in a carton, and in 2013 it launched Saikebon, a range of instant noodles. The tomato lines, by contrast, have gone. In February 2025 the tomato processor Casalasco took over the Pummarò, Polpabella and Sugo Lampo brands from Star, the local news site il Piacenza reported; Casalasco had already been producing for Star as a co-packer for more than 15 years, and the deal let Star concentrate on its core categories. Today the company’s own website leads with its stock cube, ready broth, Gran Ragù, risotto and pizza mixes, and teas.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are food brands, and all of them come from Spain or Italy: Fontaneda, Carbonell, Hojiblanca, Galbani, Star, Ponti and Bauli. Spanish and Italian food 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 village shop to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or occasion 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.

From the Fossati family to a Spanish group.

Star’s ownership has moved in and out of the Fossati family. In 1970, Corriere della Sera reported in 2001, Danilo Fossati sold half of the company to the state-controlled food holding SME, then bought the stake back about 15 years later, having kept a free hand in management throughout. In 1989 half of Star was sold to Danone, the paper said, and that stake too was brought back into the family after Danilo’s son Luca Fossati took charge. Danilo Fossati died in 1995, aged 67; Luca, who had succeeded him, was killed in the Linate air disaster of 8 October 2001, Corriere della Sera reported the next day. The paper then put Star’s workforce at 1,123.

The family next brought in a Spanish partner. Italian Wikipedia says the heirs sold 50% of the company at the end of 2006 to Agrolimen, the Barcelona group of the Carulla family that owns Gallina Blanca, and that the Spanish group soon took control; the company dates its entry into the new Gallina Blanca Star group to 2007. Spanish Wikipedia says the Fossatis’ Swiss holding, Findim Investments, kept a stake in the combined group until December 2012, when Agrolimen bought the remainder, and that in March 2015 Gallina Blanca Star renamed itself GBfoods. Star, formally Star Stabilimento Alimentare S.p.A., remains based at Agrate Brianza, and the company describes itself today as part of GBfoods alongside Gallina Blanca and other local brands.

For a design guide, Star shows how a short English word, borrowed from a founder’s wife’s name, and a jingle about “double broth” carried an Italian pantry brand from a Brianza workshop in 1948 into a Spanish-owned food group. Compare Knorr, the stock-cube maker Corriere della Sera said had Italy to itself before Star, and Maggi, another European seasoning pioneer. For this guide we use a star red, a broth gold and a warm cream with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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