The Chocolate That Outlived a Century: How Pasticceria Brignone Kept a 1905 Recipe and Still Learned to Scale

At the mouth of the Valle Maira, in Roccabruna, a few kilometres from the centre of Dronero, there is a long, low building that used to be a chicken coop. Today it is the production laboratory of Pasticceria Brignone, and it runs largely on sunlight. Inside, meringue shells are still filled and wrapped by hand, one by one, to a recipe that predates the shop itself. Umberto Brignone represents the third generation of the family. He also runs the part of the business his grandfather never had to think about: the e-commerce channel, the digital tooling, and the cash management of a seasonal micro business that now ships to Germany, France and the United States.

That combination — a century-old recipe and a modern back office — is where Umberto locates the whole story of the company. It is also why, some time ago, searching online for a business account, he ended up choosing the fintech Vivid.

The grandfather of the cuneesi

The house dolce, and Umberto's own favourite, is the Dronerese: two shells of meringue filled with a chocolate cream flavoured with rum or gianduia, still made entirely by hand and wrapped individually. Umberto calls them the parents of the more famous cuneesi — the rum filling only got its full chocolate coating around the 1930s.

The recipe is older than the family business. In 1905 it won a prize at the Fiera Campionaria in Turin; it had been invented by Giuseppe Galletti, then the mayor of Dronero, and it was from Galletti, in a manner of speaking, that Umberto's grandfather learned the craft. In 1964 his grandfather Celestino took over an old pastry shop — one already active since 1905 — and opened Pasticceria Brignone on via Roma, in the centre of Dronero. That is the year the family counts from. The business is now sixty-two years old.

The chocolates and pralines are the house's cavallo di battaglia, alongside a range of typical sweets of the province of Cuneo and of Piedmont more broadly.

What changed in sixty years — and what didn't

Ask Umberto what has changed in the way the family works since his grandfather began, and the answer is, fortunately, not much.

"Compared to sixty years ago, when my grandfather started, it isn't so much the recipes, the production processes or the ingredients that have changed as the tastes of consumers."

— Umberto Brignone, third generation, Pasticceria Brignone

Keeping the recipes, the know-how and the production intact is, for him, a point of strength — a way of giving customers a sense of truth and transparency. Brignone will never move to mass production, never reach the supermarket shelf, and Umberto frames that as the differentiator, not the limitation.

What has moved is taste. The clearest example is the arrival of an alcohol-free chocolate. The original recipes were almost all alcohol-based, because in the early twentieth century alcohol worked as a preservative and helped the chocolates last longer. As consumer habits shifted — hazelnut, torrone, peach flavours rising, alcohol consumption falling — the range had to follow. Umberto sees the two trends as closely linked.

A chicken coop that runs on sunlight

If the recipes stayed put, the operation around them did not. In 2020 the family moved production to the new laboratory in Roccabruna, rebuilt from an old chicken coop to casa clima standards — essentially zero-impact. Around eighty per cent of production is now covered by the company's own photovoltaic output.

Alongside the laboratory sits the Bistro Brignone, serving the leavened side of the house — croissants, gelato, breakfasts and snacks made next door. The historic pastry shop remains in the centre of Dronero, with the more classical range: mignon, cakes, and occasion bakes such as panettoni and colombe. In September the family adds a third point of sale, a flagship store in the centre of Turin, on via Carlo Alberto at the corner of via Po, aimed squarely at the traveller looking for something artisanal and genuine.

The oldest of the modern channels is the e-commerce, opened back in 2012. It grew noticeably during the pandemic, and today it accounts for roughly thirty per cent of turnover — as Umberto puts it, effectively an extra shop. A customer who discovers the product in the Valle Maira can reorder online and receive fresh goods in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Bringing those two worlds into conversation is, by his own account, precisely his job.

"I think the differentiating element of our business is that we've managed to combine, effectively and efficiently, sixty years of tradition — the recipes, the knowledge, the artisan's touch — with the innovation of the laboratory."

— Umberto Brignone, third generation, Pasticceria Brignone

The math of a seasonal business

Brignone is, in Umberto's own word, a micro reality: six employees, plus him and his father. Growth is deliberately flat, bottlenecked by a production the family has no intention of industrialising.

"We'll never get to industrial production — and that isn't even what we want. What we want is to keep our recipes and keep our presence on the territory, which for us are hugely important."

— Umberto Brignone, third generation, Pasticceria Brignone

Instead, the plan is to lean into the tourism that has grown in the Valle Maira over the last ten to fifteen years — including a strong German following, helped by the author Maria Schneider, whose bestselling books in Germany championed the valley and the philosophy of slow tourism — and to keep scaling the e-commerce, which can reach almost anywhere in the world in a few working days.

That model brings its own arithmetic. The business is sharply seasonal: Christmas is the peak, the first half of the year quieter, then a build again from August. Running even a micro business in Italy, Umberto is candid, is hard — bureaucracy above all — and the e-commerce that mitigates the old selling problems brings bureaucracy of its own, demanding presence, skills and training on top of daily production. And because the company handles severance provisions (TFR) internally, it needs a way to hold and remunerate the company's liquidity so those sums are there when, after years of service, an employee is owed tens of thousands of euros.

Managing the money, from the mountains to the world

Alongside traditional accounts at local banks, Umberto went looking for something to handle the online side of the operation, and found the fintech Vivid.

"I found Vivid online. I'd been looking for a while for a B2B account that would let me earn a return — and another very nice function we use is investing, the ability to buy financial instruments like ETFs or funds not as an individual but as a company, with the tax advantages that come with it."

— Umberto Brignone, third generation, Pasticceria Brignone

In daily use, the Business account handles the incoming and outgoing flows tied to the e-commerce. Cards, created in the app at no cost, cover company spending — a business trip, a motorway toll — with a bit of cashback on the transactions and expenses that document cleanly for the accountant. International payments cover the online advertising, the invoices on Meta Ads and Google Ads. Sub-accounts let him move liquidity from one place to another in a couple of clicks, and the Fixed interest and Business Brokerage features let excess liquidity earn something between the seasonal peaks. It is the interest-bearing side that answers the TFR problem: sums set aside automatically, and remunerated while they wait.

The costs, he notes, are low — nearly everything is free at the entry level, and the more professional plans that carry a fee come with a genuinely well-made product and higher rates of return. There are no commission fees on transfers or on creating cards. Coming from local banking, he had been wary of a digital platform; his own experience, he says, is that today's technology lets a small business use these services fully and without fear.

What his grandfather would make of it, Umberto has thought about. He would marvel at how many difficulties the family faces — sixty years ago everything was quicker and easier, and Italian bureaucracy remains a serious obstacle — but he would be happy with the growth, and above all with the shipping abroad. Selling in Germany, France, the United States was, Umberto's father used to tell him, his grandfather's great dream. They can do it now.

None of it, Umberto insists, is a solo effort. The collaborators are exceptional; there are no shifts to speak of, only work that needs doing and a great deal of autonomy between people. In a marginal, mountain territory, with a demographic squeeze pressing on small enterprise, being able to count on that team is fundamental. His advice to a young person thinking of continuing a family business is honest about the economics — the financial reward is not what it was in his grandfather's day, closer to an employee's — but the other rewards are real: being recognised as a historic company, a reference point for the territory, and, in an age of AI and new tools, the ability to test products and ideas quickly and see whether they scale.

He knows the product is a niche, and that Brignone will never satisfy every customer. That is not the point.

Disclaimer: This customer story is published for information purposes only and reflects the client's individual experience; it does not constitute legal, tax, financial or investment advice or an offer, and individual results are no guarantee of future performance. Investments carry risk, including possible loss of capital, and their value may fall as well as rise; product availability, rates and conditions vary by plan and may change. Information is current as of July 2026 and subject to Vivid's applicable terms and conditions.