American Business Group Milan

Speaker for February 2018

Gianluca Franzoni

Gianluca Franzoni is widely considered the world's first and foremost chocolate "sommelier". Honorary President and founder of Domori, the first chocolate company to process exclusively high-quality cacao, Gianluca followed his dream of going to the soul of chocolate by sourcing the finest cacao beans and selecting the best varieties to create the greatest chocolate in the world.

After obtaining a degree in Business and Economics from the University of Bologna, he moved to South America and lived on cacao plantations in Venezuela. It was there that his adventures in the world of cacao began. When he returned to Italy in 1997, he founded Domori and began to produce small quantities of criollo cacao at a factory just outside of Turin.

Today, in addition to his role at Domori, he is in great demand as a consultant and has pioneered the bean-to-bar movement in the world of chocolate. He conducts workshops for cacao growers in Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil to help them guarantee consistency and quality from bean-to-bar. He is an advisor to Meiji Co. Ltd in Japan for retail, food services, product and strategy and also a technical advisor to ECOM in Mexico for criollo cacao production.