In 1895 Luigi Lavazza opened a small grocery at Via San Tommaso 10 in Turin, and the company credits him with inventing the coffee blend. By mixing beans from different regions, he could keep flavor steady even when one harvest turned out bitter or thin, and the ratios became a proprietary recipe. Today Luigi Lavazza SpA, run by the third and fourth generations, is bought by roughly 16 million of Italy’s 20 million coffee buying households.

The family financed expansion without going public: Carte Noire and Merrild from JDE in 2016, 80 percent of Kicking Horse Coffee in 2017, the Mars UK drinks division for 650 million dollars in 2018, a canned cappuccino with PepsiCo in 2019, and Maxi Coffee in 2022. With about 3,800 employees in more than 90 countries and 2.24 billion euros in 2019 revenue, it ranks as the world’s seventh largest roaster. Scale brought friction, including low fair trade certification and a 2019 lawsuit over intellectual property claims against Amazon resellers, and the brand answers with sport, architecture, and art.

• Production sites include Turin, a capsule plant in Gattinara, a decaf plant in Pozzilli, and hubs in France, India, and Brazil.
• Its 2020 sustainability report showed only one in ten Lavazza production companies with fair trade certification.
• Lavazza sponsors Liverpool FC, Juventus, and Williams driver Nicholas Latifi in Formula One.
• The Nuvola headquarters in Turin’s Aurora district was designed by architect Cino Zucchi.
• The Lavazza calendar, produced since 1991, has been shot by Helmut Newton, David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz, and Platon.