Sacla - making pesto in Asti
Sacla is one of those peculiarly Italian food businesses – a superbly organised export machine which at the same time manages to wrap itself with the aura of tradition and the earth, of family and passion. In all of this, it has been very successful. It is now selling its products – jars of condiments and prepared vegetables, in 50 countries. Its name is indelibly linked with basil pesto, its flagship product, and that is what we here to see. It’s July, the basil season is about to peak, and the Sacla factory is going at full throttle, turning the vast truckloads of fresh basil that come through its doors into enough pesto to sell to the world for the next 12 months.
Wearing amusing hairnets and clinical coats, we tour the factory floor to see huge sacks of pine-nuts, giant slabs of cheese and mountains of basil. While I am enthralled by the machines that clean, steam and pack, and the sight of all those jars whizzing about like armies of little glass soldiers (they are deeply satisfying to me at a fundamental level connected to order and organisation), Matty is fascinated by the fact of giant contraptions of stainless steel mechanically following the process by which pesto is made at home in the kitchen. Everything is done the same way but on the most massive scale. Take a tonne of basil and a quarter-tonne of pine-nuts, put them through a giant food processor, and stir. If Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant had a kitchen, this is how his pesto would be made. Every year, 18 million jars of pesto come out of this giant cooking-house and are sent out into the world.
The vegetable-processing business was set up by Ercole Seconde in the 1920s. He chose Asti because it was the vegetable garden of the Italian north – vast fields and plantations of vegetables that fed much of Italy, made rich by the fertile soil of the River Tanaro’s valley. Working with his wife, he sold his products on the national market, and then began to move out of Italy, starting with France and Germany. The war that devastated Europe put paid to all that, and as his son Carlo, who today runs the business with his brother Lorenzo, says: “My parents did what they could.” Interestingly, Signora Seconde was not the typical Italian mamma, imparting to her famiglia a love of food. She worked in the family business, as did the nonna, who went so far as to set up home on the company premises. Carlo and Lorenzo learned all they know about food from the family cook, who Carlo describes as having been “fantastic, almost professional standard”.
After the war, Sacla regrouped and got its act together again. Carlo began to work there straight out of school in the 1950s. He had modern ideas, one of them being advertising. Odd though it seems in today’s world, in the years before that Sacla sold its products without advertising them. Advertising helped build new markets, even outside Italy’s borders. Carlo was particularly interested in the English market, and did well there. Sacla now has 52 per cent of the British pesto market. Then came Switzerland, and within a matter of a couple of decades, the world. As Lorenzo explains it: “That was the dawn of the food preparation industry, and we were among the pioneers. We are lucky in not having had to invent a brand. We promote what we actually are – an Italian family company. And we don’t compete head to head with the big multinationals.”
The company now has an annual turnover of EUR138 million, and Portugal and Malta are its best-performing markets. The Maltese market, we are told, is extraordinarily receptive to new products and will buy, try and use them. It has fallen for Sacla pesto, and I can see why – we love pesto, but we don’t love hunting for fresh basil and then making the sauce from scratch. There are lots of people who think that way, fortunately for Sacla, and many of them live in countries where fresh basil is a luxury, rather than something you can grow in your patch of soil or pick up from the truck on your way home from work.
Though Sacla prepares and packs a great variety of vegetables and olives, pesto has been by far its greatest success. Pesto just means something crushed with a pestle and mortar, but has come to be the by-word for basil pesto. Sacla also make red pesto, and pesto of aubergine, wild rocket, and coriander – a new thing, to satisfy the orientalised tastes of many young Europeans. Sacla’s classic pesto is made on the basis of a traditional Ligurian recipe – Liguria being the region next door to Piemonte, which is where Asti is. “It’s crucial to cut the basil at the right time, when it has developed its aroma and before it becomes woody,” Lorenzo says. The next day, we head out for the basil fields, which stretch as far as we can see. The sun is blazing hot, but in the distance we can see Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest peak, covered in snow. Piemonte is a corruption of the words for ‘at the foot of the mountains’, and here in this flattest part of the landscape you can truly see it. The fields are framed by the Alps.
These particular basil fields are owned by Fratelli Amateis – four brothers under contract to Sacla. There is an absolute ban on the use of chemicals, which means that the endless rows of basil must be weeded by hand. We watch as men move systemically down the rows, cleaning up. The earth is steamed and covered in sheets of plastic before the basil seed goes in, which kills the seeds of weeds and other undesirables, but still some come up. The first lot of basil seeds go into the ground in April, and there are staggered plantings all the way through to the summer. Harvesting begins in June and ends in September. If the weather is good, as it has been this year, basil continues to be cut every 15 days right up to October. In a single season, the Amateis brothers cut 400 tonnes of basil from their 10 hectares – enough to keep the Big Friendly Giant in pesto for a lifetime.
About Asti
Asti was the vegetable capital of Piemonte, famous for the produce of its surrounding fields. Every morning there is a market in the old town square, where local produce is sold. Asti was one of the first free communes in Italy, and in 1140 received the right to mint its own coins. The peak of its splendour and power was in the 13th century, and it remains rich in medieval palaces and mercantile houses, many with the monumental towers that signified the importance of the family who lived there. Asti is famous for its food festival, held in September a week before the ‘palio’ horse race. Stalls of food and wine line the streets and squares, and a parade of agricultural floats proceeds through the town. Asti is a delight between October and December, when the white truffle is in season. Neighbouring Alba is better known for its truffle fair, but some of the best truffles are found in the hills of Asti, and every weekend in this period there is a truffle festival.