Who among you has been cooking tortellini during the recently ended festive season?
While cooking is almost a ritual during the holiday season, in the everyday routine, time is often short, and many dishes become impossible to cook. This was, more or less, the thought that led Giovanni Rana to create his business, 100% Made in Italy.
Fresh pasta for working women
The idea came about in the 1960s when Giovanni began to think that fewer and fewer working women would have the time to make traditional tortellini.
But let us take a step back. Giovanni Rana was born in Cologna Veneta (VR) in 1937 and, at the age of thirteen, left school to work with his brothers in the family bakery. On 28 March 1962, his intuition turned into a concrete project, and Pastificio Rana opened its doors. Giovanni was tireless. He bought a Guzzi motorbike for eighteen thousand lire, with which he personally made deliveries to customers.
Tortellini production goes industrial
Soon, the business grew, and it became clear that fresh pasta was ready for industrial production. Giovanni Rana thus began to design, together with mechanics and engineers, machinery capable of sealing tortellini as if they were handmade by the ‘sfogline’, i.e. the women who traditionally rolled out the pastry for tortellini, lasagne and tagliatelle.
Thanks to high demand and the economic boom, production grew from 15 kilos to hundreds of kilos of tortellini per hour in just a few years. In 1971, RANA opened a new factory in San Giovanni Lupatoto, right next to the family bakery, and, using trucks, organized the sale of fresh pasta throughout Italy.
The fame of RANA products grew, and in the 1980s, the owners received offers worth billions to buy the company. However, Giovanni shoots straight, refuses to sell and invests heavily in advertising, focusing – among the first – on personal branding and often devising the commercials and TV campaigns himself. Giovanni Rana thus realised another childhood dream: to shoot commercials in Hollywood, no less!
A new adventure: the restaurant business
Over the years, the company’s growth led Giovanni to diversify the business and seek new markets outside Italy. It was in 2007 that the first restaurant, ‘Da Giovanni’, was opened in the province of Verona, and it is now Michelin-starred. This marked the start of a new challenge, which committed the company to bringing to the table what until now had remained on supermarket shelves. In 2012, the pasta factory landed in America, and the first pasta and fresh sauces factory in Chicago and the first restaurant in New York opened practically at the same time.
In 2003, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi appointed Giovanni Rana Cavaliere del Lavoro, and in 2006, he received an Honorary Degree in Communication from Lumsa University.
Today, the Giovanni Rana pasta factory, with his son Gian Luca as Managing Director, has more than 20 restaurants in Italy, two plants in the USA, a restaurant in NY, one in Berlin, five plants in Italy, and one in Belgium, with 3,500 employees and a turnover of hundreds of millions of Euros!
Congratulations to those who believe in it, know how to put their face to it and bring Made in Italy and Italian traditions to the world!
Discover more stories of outstanding Italian companies connected to the world of pasta.