Our story

Federico did not open just any shop. He bought the oldest building in Caltrano — the house that had belonged to the noble Bonaguro family — and started the village's only grocery store there. Bread and cheese, oil and pasta, white and yellow flour, dried chestnuts, salted fish: everything was there. A bakery, a delicatessen and a coffee roastery soon grew up around the shop.

Caltrano was the obligatory crossing point for trade between the plain and the Asiago Highlands. Every day the carters went up and down the steep road of the Costo: timber and logs down to the sawmills, flour and fresh vegetables up to the mountains. When they reached the village bridge they stopped at Zuccato's, to stretch their legs and buy something for the family.

In 1880 Federico had married Maria Pesavento, from the Asiago Highlands, and he knew the mountain sauerkraut tradition well: white cabbages finely shredded, salted in layers and left to ferment slowly in wooden tubs. Every autumn he bought a few barrels of sauerkraut from a carter to resell in the shop. People loved it straight away.

In 1884 his brother Rinaldo joined the company and the firm took the company name it still bears today, Fratelli Zuccato. Alongside the activities mentioned above, a small pasta workshop was added, producing «Pasta Superba», press-extruded as was the Neapolitan custom of the time. But it was a few years later that he decided to produce in house the product he believed in most: sauerkraut…!

In the very first year production was so abundant that the surplus had to be sold off, offering the sauerkraut to shops in the neighbouring villages too. Chance did the rest: that year a brosemada — the treacherous frost that comes at night, under a clear sky, and burns the shoots — devastated the vegetable gardens of half the province. The Zuccato sauerkraut, safe in its brine, was the only vegetable left. Orders came from Schio, Thiene, Valdagno, Bassano del Grappa, all the way to Vicenza.

Within a few months sauerkraut had become the shop's signature product, the one that would carry the Zuccato name across all of northern Italy.

Before the labelled tins there was wood. There were the tubs where the white cabbage was salted and left to work, slowly, following the rhythm of the lactic fermentation guided by salt and time. They were not built by ordinary carpenters but by the mastellari of the Highlands: the Zuccato family bought them from the craftsmen of the Gaiga district, in Asiago — some of them distant relatives of Maria Pesavento herself.

It took hands able to «close» the wood without betraying it: well-seasoned spruce staves, hoops driven in at exactly the right point, a solid base. Because sauerkraut is unforgiving — if the tub does not hold, the brine escapes, air gets in and the work is lost. That container was preservation and packaging in one: it held the product and let it travel to the shops. A craft made of precise gestures and ancient words, often in the Cimbrian language, today almost vanished.

As processing grew, running the shop and the production together became too much. The two brothers divided the tasks: Rinaldo stayed with the delicatessen, the roastery and local trade; Federico continued to run the pasta workshop and the sauerkraut. Later he moved production to Chiuppano, where the railway had arrived between 1907 and 1910.

It was not a sentimental choice but an industrial one: from the Chiuppano-Caltrano station the cabbages arrived from Trentino and the barrels of sauerkraut left by wagon for the whole of northern Italy. Since then the production site of Fratelli Zuccato has never moved.

The Alto Vicentino became a war zone on the mountains of Pasubio and the Highlands. During the Strafexpedition of 1916, an Austrian artillery shell even fell into the courtyard of the Zuccato house in Caltrano. The family was saved, but production had to stop for more than two years. When Federico died, it was his sons Giustiniano and Gio’Batta who led the rebirth.

In the 1920s the company started again, and in 1932 it was registered as number 1 on the roll of fruit and vegetable exporters of the province of Vicenza. The 1930s also brought the first mechanisation: one of the first engines built by Pellizzari drove the slicer; five people built up to 230 tubs a day, hooped with the metal straps recovered from bales of Australian merino wool. The second war too was endured and overcome. Every reconstruction was sturdier than the one before.

The limit of sauerkraut was the season: it sold only in autumn and winter. The turning point was pasteurisation, which made it possible to keep it whole and flavourful all year round, sealed in tins and distributed throughout Italy in every season. From a «poor» food of peasant society, sauerkraut became a speciality chosen for its taste and its quality.

It was the years of the third generation — Antonio, Remo and Romolo Zuccato — that brought the company into the modern era. Antonio looked after administration and relations with the banks, Remo production and technology, Romolo the organisation of work. They had the courage to export Italian sauerkraut even to France and Germany — where sauerkraut was a centuries-old tradition — following their instinct, exactly as Federico and Rinaldo had done at the beginning.

The first great diversification came almost by chance. In the mid-1960s, during a business trip to Czechoslovakia to buy cabbages, Remo Zuccato fell in love with snaim, the sweet-and-sour gherkins of the Slavic tradition. After two or three years of trials and of tuning the recipe to Italian taste, the gherkin line was born, still today among the most loved.

From then on the range widened without pause: sweet-and-sour vegetables, pickles, olives, capers, antipasti in oil. A precise choice — not to compete on volume with the big brands, but to focus on speciality: distinctive products of superior quality, each with a character of its own. It is the same vocation shown with sauerkraut ever since 1868.