Althea
Founded in 1932, Althea was started by a family in Parma who were very well-known, called the Bertozzi’s. The company was named after a flower that Carlo Bertozzi picked during the family’s factory visit and apparently a flower is a guarantee of authenticity and excellence which became the two cornerstones of the new company’s philosophy. Althea’s success was in their aim that the company should represent “Italian Cooking” and therefore not only be a producer of tomato paste, where there was already a stable market, but a producer of more refined, ready-to-use products.
In 1962, the company was passed into the hands of the British-Dutch multinational company Unilever which, after dismantling the Althea retail network, determined the future of the Parma company’s brands. Alongside the sauces and jams already consolidated on the market, new products were created in Parma in the 1960s and 1970s. Soon after, Althea became a division of SAGIT of Latina, the Unilever company producing deep-frozen products and after 1982, the Althea plant was used even more by Unilever for the development of its own new products. With a reorganization plan, it was decided to transfer production to Belgium and the Parma plant was put up for sale. After years of innovation, in 2006 there was a new line of sauces launched called Regioni d’Italia that was inspired by regional traditions from all over Italy. Along with new products they had updated their packaging and recipes
