Discover the Ciberie brand: here’s our interview.

Ciberie was founded in 2017 by an idea of Francesco Donadini. However, Ciberie is much more than just a company or a brand: it is passion and love for the territory, originality, and authenticity.

Ciberie was born as an innovative project that we can define as PDE, that is, Small Evolved Distribution, with a main goal: to bring the excellence products of small artisanal producers of the best Italian gastronomy to the right customers. A reality that was created with the intent to bring small producers of excellence closer to retail distribution.

Francesco's objective is to promote the development of an organized network of food places, sales points that enhance Italian agri-food excellences and, at the same time, want to provide their customers with quality products, natural, genuine, and distinctly local food.

Ciberie could be summarized by quoting the "5T" guiding principles of the Academy that Francesco himself founded: Territory, Tradition, Typicality, Transparency, and Traceability. In fact, the product boxes that Ciberie selects and packages, the Treasure Chest of Rarities, are the perfect solution for anyone seeking the perfect combination of genuineness, sustainability, and transparency in food.

We love these artisans, these producers of unique, certified, and multi-awarded delicacies: they are true treasures embedded in our Peninsula among seas and mountains and in the most remote roads of villages and countryside. We do not just focus on living their products, but we want to discover more closely the protagonists of this brand. That’s why we sent some questions to those who manage communication with us.

Stay with us to learn about Ciberie: read the answers!
 

• Who are we talking to?
  Francesco Donadini, food hunter and creator of Ciberie, the network of good food!
   
• Is the company family-run? In what year was the company founded, and who was the founder?
  Ciberie was created in 2017, it is a brand, a new word in the vocabulary, created by myself, who has been involved in communication since 1976, eventually discovering the importance of healthy and quality food at the end of the last century, giving rise to the Academy of 5T in 2004, editing the magazine Sapori d’Italia from 2008 to 2015, and then creating the Ciberie brand to combine products from short supply chains, short labels, true km and zero chemicals with retailers attentive to their customers and managers of new hybrid places (stores with tables or eateries with a grocery store).
   
• Who was the founder and what was their background or from what working and professional field did they come if different from the current one?
  The journey has been long and has gone through other successful experiences, always linked to food hunting and the culture of quality food. In 2005 I founded the Academy of 5T (Territory, Tradition, Typicality, Transparency, Traceability) with the aim of bringing together small artisanal producers and offering them a communication service to give visibility to their work and make them known at fairs and exhibitions. In 2008, I acquired the magazine “Sapori d’Italia,” an adventure that lasted until 2015 when the crisis in publishing forced the project to a stop. During the active period, 43 issues were published.
   
• What is the true motivation or triggering fact behind the establishment of this company, and when did it happen?
  Ciberie, in hindsight, seems to have been born almost by "chance," while it is the result of meticulous attention to the environment, to society, to all the "half-full glass" around us that we do not see due to superficiality and banality. It is not a carefully studied entrepreneurial project; it is not marketing, but simply experience, listening, observation, and admiration for how much good people there are who do work for everyone, bringing well-being to all without making noise. My idea of a "hybrid" store was truly tried out in 2015, in Milan, as a countercurrent initiative at EXPO, the food park, when I was offered to manage the store along with an architect passionate about cooking, taking care of the selection of producers, the training of shop assistants, the style of communicating the excellence product, different, genuine, to be told at the restaurant, the café, the bar, the wine shop, to customers, and discovering the possibility of purchasing at the counter what they consumed on the plate. The spirit of the narrated tasting enhances the shelf because the shelf does not speak while the plate does. Thus, we started a multifunctional venue in the Isola neighborhood that could, besides selling, "understand" the product and have the ability to propose it to customers directly on the plate, tasting and appreciating its quality and naturalness, contributing to making known the work of artisanal producers.
   
• What is your relationship with the land of origin and its typicity? And why do you want to tell it through your products?
  For Ciberie, it is important to discover that preserving and enhancing biodiversity is a useful and necessary wealth for good economy. The richness of the Italian agri-food heritage has long been overlooked. We are very attentive to the peculiarities of the products and their high intrinsic quality, made of innovation and tradition. Tradition is the peak of the innovation that preceded us. Therefore, knowing the tradition is necessary to be able to innovate. Admiring the stories of the producing companies, which have made sustainability, biodiversity protection, and environmental awareness their life mission, has allowed all of us to enjoy a charming landscape today and to access multiple products for a healthy Mediterranean diet, a heritage of humanity! The motto of Rete Ciberie is: products with SHORT supply chain, short labels, TRUE km, and ZERO chemicals!
   
• What was the first product you created?
  More than a "first product," being Ciberie a selection and distribution network, the first product was a service; it is not a play on words, but the service is an immaterial product. So the first was the idea of the hybrid store that would promote food culture by offering high-quality excellences on the shelf and on the plate. An idea that was realized in 2015 with "Cum Grano Salis" (ristorante-bottega-bar-cafeteria-wine shop) in Milano; that idea sparked the intuition of a network of similar points, the network of good food of the Ciberie network and the system of small evolved distribution (PDE), to connect small producers with stores suitable for the quality of their productions.
   
• What is the flagship product today?
  The Ciberie Network is in development and over time it is expanding upstream, with the addition of other producers who offer special flavors, tastes, and aromas, bringing new intelligence to agriculture and confronting the environmental impact and customer health with awareness. Nature hosts us and provides us with fertile and diverse microclimates. All products in the Ciberie catalog are excellences, all are products "of pride and passion"!
   
• Which product throughout the company's history has most embodied the beating heart, philosophy, and soul of the company itself?
  Without a doubt, the new proposal called Box-Ci. It is a service that materialized in September 2020 with the release of the first edition/package. Box-Ci, the Ciberie box, also referred to as "the Treasure Chest of Rarities" is a box containing 6 personally selected products, with monthly frequency. Not like a monthly magazine, but with the spirit of a taste journey that every month offers 6 delicacies or specialties from Italy. This allows those who receive it to discover new flavors, learn about new tastes, reconnect with flavors from the past, and share serene moments of taste with friends. Each Box-Ci contains a booklet that tells the individual products, the protagonist companies, and the territory that welcomes their presence. Box-Ci offers a complete sensory experience with every bite.
   
• Talking about today: how much has the company grown since its founding? Can we have some numbers?
  It is a start-up, a young plant growing in a world suffering from a global pandemic, which needs a major change in attention towards the environment, peace, and justice. As a food hunter, I have twenty years of experience, with precise contacts and relationships with hundreds of producers and now over 100 points of the Ciberie network. The catalog dedicated to the Ciberie network will exceed 2000 references this year, from about 200 small producers of excellence.
   
• At this moment: more tradition or more innovation?
  They are two words that coexist, like train tracks, one does not exclude the other: on the contrary, it is the basis for the value of the other. As previously mentioned, tradition is the peak of the innovation that preceded us. I think this can be a shared thought because it comes from listening and interacting with many industry operators.
   
• What has been the most important evolution of the company to get to what it is today?
  It was the name: Ciberie. In the land of food, there are pizzerias, ice cream parlors, pastry shops, butcheries, breweries, etc., but there were no Ciberies, the places of good food!
   
• Looking towards the future: what kind of tomorrow awaits the company? Are there any planned changes or new evolutionary processes?
  The main novelty is that I am considering a possible expansion abroad, in collaboration with some French distributors, and I am receiving requests from other foreign countries, not only European ones.
   
• Do you plan to create new products?
  We are always on alert! This is a time for reflection and change. Therefore, we are trying to work on the organic aspect and the motivation of people because the project is becoming more and more demanding, and the retail world must find new values and thus a new way to present itself to the customer. Learning to combine online and offline as two sides of a single door with the customer is our main thought.
   
• Having focused on Spaghetti & Mandolino, how important is online sales for you, what has been your past relationship with this sales channel, and how do you see it in the future?
  I had my first website in 1994! The pandemic forced everyone to confront online, big data is born for business, and we have witnessed that. Globalization has opened up infinite possibilities, but now is the time to give value, not to sell off. It is important to give value to the environment, to go from extensive to inclusive, to the product that costs but is worth it because it is sustainable and does not destroy energy and resources. The awareness of less finds space. Less mistakes, less waste, less friction, less preservatives, less toxins, less garbage, less energy spent... and on the other hand, more networks, more participation, more culture, more good food, more observation, more passion, and more attention to oneself and others. This is the value we all desire, and it now becomes necessary to practice it. Online sales is an intelligent tool, the logistics of packages has accelerated awareness and convenience, but like all activities, there are stages of development, and to consolidate, I believe it will need integration with the places that the physicality of good food will require. Using algorithms to converge in home delivery could foresee physically staffed and authoritative points to avoid costly dispersion of delivery flows, orienting them into experiential stores as our points try to be in the Ciberie network.
   
• Value: what has it been, what is it today, and what will it be for your company in the future?
  I have been a pioneer observing the evolution of retail and projecting the Ciberie project as a new retail service system capable of developing a new economy that starts from the territory and the excellence of the Italian agri-food reality. As I wrote in the previous answers, combining online and offline is the near future. We will see together how to do this gradually!

S&M