A while ago the class headed to a local artisan gelato producer, Gelateria Sarchioni, which Faine wrote about for us here. However, I got a bit more history and perspective about the company in an interview with one of the proud owners, Fabio Sarchioni.
In my interview with Fabio he helped me answer two questions: is it possible for anyone to avoid the global market in today's economy, and more importantly, why would someone want to and how would they go about it?
Fabio is the owner of the company, the land, the factory, and is also in charge of everything from the day to day gelato production to the hiring of employees, so he is truly the driving force behind the company. “[It's a little firm]” he tells me in Italian “[so we really have to do everything by ourselves].” However, the advantages to being a small firm quickly became apparent once we started to talk about his priorities. Because it is such a small company Fabio is able to obtain his work force locally, and many of his employees are his friends or people that he knows personally. As a result, he told me that he has never had to scold or fire any of his employees and it is easier for him to maintain the quality of his product because he can trust his employees.
The benefits of working locally extend past employees, Fabio told me, “[90 % of our ingredients are Italian products, it may happen that they don't give us Italian products, but that is because the Italian producers don't have what we want, so sometimes we get products from Spain or other places, but the providers we look for are local. Even the machines we use to make the gelato are Italian...For us, the most important thing is the quality of the product. We are always looking for products that we like even more, so when we find a product of higher quality, we use that.]”
In the explanation of his suppliers, Fabio answered my most difficult questions about globalization without even realizing it, and it wasn't quite the answer I was expecting. Is there a way to avoid the global market in today's economy? Probably not a very reasonable one, because the global market can be made to work for both large and small producers. Perhaps by accident, but Fabio Sarchioni has turned the global market into his safety net. When local suppliers fail to provide him with fresh fruit for whatever reason, he has a backup so that he can just keep churning out gelato, which means that consumers like me can just keep doing what we do best: consuming.
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