The history of Caffè Milani began in 1937, when Celestino Milani decided to leave his life as a barman to open a small shop in Via Vitani, in the historic centre of Como, which at the time served both as a coffee roasting plant for the city's bars and as a neighbourhood shop. Towards the end of the 1960s, the baton was passed to his son Pierluigi, who, treasuring the recipes of the blends and the secrets of artisanal coffee production, transferred the family roasting laboratories to Lipomo, turning the business into the factory equipped with state-of-the-art machinery able to meet the many and changing needs of consumers.
Caffè Milani's range of products for the horeca food and hotel industries, and for retail is in fact today very broad, the result of over eighty-five years of trading and research. There is ground coffee that is ideal for moka and filter coffee, pods and capsules that are compatible with the most popular domestic machines, and obviously there are the coffee beans themselves, for those who are looking for the very highest quality and freshness. Single origins and blends of different varieties come from all over the world, including from Brazil, Kenya, Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea. "We are one of the coffee companies that draws on the most origins, over fifty in all, and every year we introduce new ones to expand the range. Our raw ingredients are always highly controlled because we only work with plantations whose cultivation processes and soil care are familiar with' explains Elisabetta, Celestino's niece, who with her brother Mattia makes up the third generation of the Milani family. "Italy is the undisputed home of the perfect espresso blend, for which there is no written rule, only many recipes in which different origins are skilfully blended to create products with new aromas and sensory mixes. There are many blends in our own range, but Milani was the first roasting company in Italy to talk about pure single-origin coffee".
Today Caffè Milani has ten sales outlets, two of which are in Como, and it supplies hotels, bars and restaurants all over Italy and the world. It seeks to meet all customers' needs with customised operations. Many of their blends and single-origins have received awards from International Coffee Tasting, a competition that rewards the best coffees every year on the basis of their sensory qualities. This goes to prove the effectiveness of the constant control and attention that the company places to every stage of production, from the selection of raw materials to the packaging that preserves the freshness, goodness and exotic aromas of the coffee. History, heart, strength, soul, ideas, character and harmony are the constant features on which Caffè Milani has been basing its business since 1937, the seven pillars that tell of its artisan origins and bold attitude to experimentation. Even though today it is a company with fifty employees that produces on an industrial scale, the Como-based roasting company has not lost its artisan roots, still operating with the watchful eye and scrupulous attention to detail inherited from grandfather Celestino.