Pernigotti chocolate will no longer be produced in Italy: “The company's Novi Ligure production plant is closing. This means 100 workers at home and as many families in difficulty". These are the words that Tiziano Crocco di Uila pronounced on 6 November at the end of the meeting of the trade unions with the representatives of the Turkish ownership of the confectionery company. Pernigotti no longer belonged to the family that had founded it in 1860: in 1995 it passed to the Averna, then from 2013 to the Tuksöz.
“The managing director was accompanied by his lawyers and he informed us that they are not interested in the plant – said Crocco -. The few commercial sector employees who remain will be transferred to Milan. From 13 pm on November 7, an assembly will be held with the workers to decide on the mobilization" of a town that does not want to give up the tradition of the company founded in 1860. "It will be a strong initiative to underline the severe blow that the city will suffer and the economy of the province”, concluded Crocco.
Determined the reaction of the Flai Cgil secretary Marco Malpassi who stated: “We have been making proposals to the company for five years, against balance sheets on average in the red for 10 million each year and four managing directors who have taken turns. We kept seeing this 'bloodbath' in management and for years they gave us owls, so much so that even at Eurochocolate in October the owners denied that the Novi plant had problems. But now they have decided to close. Sure, sooner or later we expected it, but the madness of the whole story is that they lost 50 million euros to reach closure after five years when, with a serious industrial plan five years ago and the use of social safety nets, perhaps they could to save budgets and jobs”.
Pernigotti was founded in 1860 by Stefano Pernigotti: at the beginning it was a grocery store famous for its nougat. But the real success came in 1927 when the industrial production of gianduiotto was launched, the chocolate invented in Turin in 1865. In 1935 the company bought Sperlari and a year later it started the production of mixes for ice cream parlors. Again, in 1971 he bought Streglio, specialized in cocoa-based products. In the eighties the crisis that forced Pernigotti to sell Sperlari to the American HJHeinz Company. In 1995 Stefano Pernigotti, left without heirs after the death of his two sons in a road accident, sold the brand to the Averna family which in turn sold it to the Turkish group of the Toksöz family in 2013.
