Our history – the history of Latteria Sociale Stallone – is based on the values of cooperation among people and for more than seventy years we have been working together to guarantee the highest quality.
The territoriality and the proximity of the farms where the milk comes from, characterize all the processes of this historical reality: the milk arrives in a few minutes at the cheese plant, ready to be processed and thus ensuring a fresh, genuine and 1000/o Italian DOP product: Grana Padano.
Our history
31st January 1946 in the countryside of Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna (Italy) our story starts: a tale of rebirth and hope, symbol of the determination to start aver of many small landowners and tenants who returned to their land with the terrible burden of war on their shoulders, but with the prospect of a different future for themselves and their children.
And it’s all true. Twenty-six owners and tenants of rural areas around Piacenza, a few hundred metres from the Great River Po, decided to get together and set up one of the first cooperatives in the immediate post-war period, marking the birth of the Latteria Sociale Stallone.
The mission: process the “milk produced by members and sell dairy products to share the real profits among them proportionally to the milk supplied” and by the end of the 1950s, 9,000 quintals of milk were processed each year. Then the years of economic boom arrived, with the Italian economy growing at a fast pace, and the Latteria Stallone alike: the number of members rose to 80 and the annual quintals of milk to 30,000.
In the 1970s, agriculture underwent a major transformation: with the birth of the first factories, depopulation of the countryside towards the cities and the modernization of Italian society, the number of workers drastically reduced, and fields were partly abandoned and partly handed over to the large landowners. Also the number of the Latteria’s members fell but this was offset by an increase in the amount of milk supplied, up to 65,000 quintals, thanks, above all, to the first technological transformations in the agricultural world.
In 1983 began the construction of the new cheese making plant, still operational today, and the focus is increasingly on research and innovation to obtain a product that was as pure as possible and of the highest quality: in 1954 Grana Padano is granted its Designation of Origin status and, in 1996, Protected Designation of Origin (Grana Padano DOP) status.
1991: a huge fire completely destroys the maturing warehouse and 20,000 wheels of Grana Padano are burnt. This disaster did not discourage the band among the members and the value of cooperation was strengthened, so much so that in a short time the Latteria Stallone became one of the most important producers of Grana Padano DOP in the area.
Today
The Latteria Stallone has doubled its production in the last 10 years, reaching 200,000 quintals of milk processed a year resulting in 35,000 Grana Padano wheels each year. Every day, we produce 95 wheels of Grana Padano, in addition to the 26,000 that slowly mature in the warehouse, before being placed on the market.
20% of our production is exported ali over the world. Some activities of the cheese making factory have been automated: for example, the system for turning the wheels at a controlled temperature has been createci and the salting rooms enlarged to enable the full potential of the “affioratori” (separator machines) operateci through a computerized system. In the 28-boiler room we have installed a ‘bundle-holder’, an automated robot to handle the cheese freshly out of the boilers.
The actual processing of the cheese, however, as required by the Grana Padano DOP production regulations, has not changed and still requires the cheesemaker’s hands to control the cooking times in the large copper boilers and ends with the extraction of the mass, which is tied up and placed in the into metal baskets under a weight to give it its typical shape.
