Hot innovation at Sammontana

If today Sammontana is the first Italian ice cream company and the leader in frozen confectionery in the country, it is due to its ability to change.

An adventure born more than 70 years ago in a provincial bar that has evolved by combining tradition and innovation.

Two elements that are part of the DNA of the current CEO, Leonardo Bagnoli, with whom I had the pleasure of discussing the evolution of Sammontana, a company in which the “culture of innovation is the result of concrete behavior and daily work toward common goals.”

Leonardo, in a complex but opportunity-filled period such as the one we are living in, what challenges and changes are you facing?
Change has been a constant for a long time, but it is true that in recent years it has been faster than in the past. Today new products are “consumed” faster and faster, the customer wants innovation and personalization. It has become a real style in which the consumer demands products that satisfy exactly its needs. In food, we have gone from demanding products with functional valences to products with distinctive characteristics, made for niches.

Niches that actually turn out to be much larger as external consumers over time demand these products designed specifically for a certain category of buyers. Niches today are self-feeding and getting bigger and bigger, and therein lies the challenge: trying to fill more niches in the market.

So what was stated by Seth Godin and that is that the market is made up of small tribes of consumers that you have to constantly feed…
Yes, certainly, the consumer is part of specific tribes depending on the product that they turn to in order to satisfy a specific need.

We are called, therefore, to intercept trends in advance and enter the new market niche with the right product to gain a major competitive advantage. This is a key to being able to compete: speed of entry into potential niches and excel from the start.

“We want to be a high-impact innovation incubator.”

For the past 1 1/2 years, Sammontana and Lenovys have been collaborating on a project with a very specific goal: to generate high-impact innovation. What does that mean, and what results have you achieved?
In this period of working together, we have achieved a primary result: the people involved in the project have begun to think about innovation by stepping outside the classical canons of the current product. Before, our mental approach led us to think only from what we currently produce.
The second result: people have gained the ability to work as a team. Managers from different fields are working together on the development of innovative solutions, and this is fueling the first result, generating a crescendo of more and more innovative ideas.
This “innovation incubator” is now able not only to have ideas, but also to carry them forward in a structured way to the testing and industrialization stage. I cannot anticipate anything now, but by the end of the year, everyone will be able to see the fruit of this work on the market.

Can you reveal to us on what directions you have moved to generate high-impact innovation?
We generated ideas by starting with ice cream, under the Sammontana brand, and breakfast products, under the Tre Marie brand, and thinking in a new way about their respective moments of consumption. In other words, from the soul of ice cream and croissant we came to develop completely different products.

At this stage what guided you? Creativity or discipline?
As we learned well from Lenovys, generating high-impact innovation requires a dash of creativity, but above all, discipline and method. Doing innovation today is a strenuous job of trial and error, of turning left and right, of stepping back in order to move forward tomorrow.

The culture of innovation at Sammontana

Creating a “Culture of Innovation” in the company is a process that originates from the establishment of key behaviors, reiterated over time. In fact, field experience and international sociological studies on this subject show that it is not necessary to make a “culture of innovation” in order to obtain organizations of people capable of generating innovation.
At Sammontana, what habits have you seen installed in people that made you realize that you have created a new culture of innovation?
I think of really simple behaviors, but they gave me a concrete sense of what had changed in the company: people from different sectors now meeting for coffee together. For example, it didn’t happen before that a purchasing manager came into direct contact with a colleague from marketing or product development. This made me realize that indeed before there was a company divided into separate sectors, where it was difficult to compare and communicate. Today this is no longer the case: we all work together toward a common goal. This is, concretely, our culture of Innovation.

…It is no accident that Albert Einstein said that people are crazy because they want to get different results by continuing to do the same things over and over again. In innovation this is very true: you cannot have high impact results by continuing to do the same things over and over again. On the contrary, in order to do high-impact innovation, it is very common to change one’s mind and develop based on the experience gained along the way. Is this also happening in Sammontana?
Yes, certainly. I think people have a great desire to do different things. In companies, not only in ours, many young people have a desire to work on new and exciting projects that bring real innovation.

Certainly you have to know how to choose people well, put them together and, as an entrepreneur, pay attention to the psycho-attitudinal aspects to put people in the ideal conditions to give their best.