Pioneer of the Italian pet food market

Morando was established by Enrico Riccardo Morando, who is regarded as a father of the Italian pet supplies industry. At the end of the 1940s, the resourceful entrepreneur noticed a billboard in the French city of Marseille that caught his attention because of the dog and cat food products that were advertised there. He looked for the products and brought some back home. What followed was the start of Morando's production of wet pet food, launched under the brand names Vitto Dog and Vitto Cat, in Neive in the province of Cuneo. 

In the years that followed, the company, which is also a respected manufacturer of horse feed and a wine grower and maker in Italy, steadily expanded its pet food operations. In 1981 Morando opened an ultra-modern production facility for dry food at its headquarters in Andezeno, close to Turin. The facility was doubled in size in 2007 and now has a production capacity of over 100 000 tonnes a year. In 1994 the launch of canned wet food production followed in the Molfetta (Bari) facility. This plant currently has an annual capacity of more than 140 000 t. 
In 2015 the company built an automated warehouse at its headquarters in Andezeno with more than 7 000 pallet spaces and new packaging lines to create state-of-the-art formats such as pouches. At the same time the production process in the plant was optimised and significantly reviewed to improve the logistics efficiency. Morando runs six distribution centres and two transit points in Italy to ensure coverage of the entire national territory. 
"The integration of the automated warehouse with the new facility has triggered a series of investments that has yielded substantial innovation with regard to the technical corporate assets. Such innovation has also influenced the technology of the products themselves," states Morando. The high level of investment in modern technology has enabled the company to pick up on current trends in pet food at an early stage and develop modern product lines that are very popular with pet owners. "Our labs boast sophisticated machines capable of performing physical-chemical analyses for raw ingredients and finished product testing. Along with its daily work on quality and food safety control with universities and other scientific institutions, our team of in-house veterinarians is always active in its search for new types of food that are increasingly functional for the satisfaction and wellness of pets,", stresses Morando.