the interpretation of Angelo Po
dialogue with Rossella Po owner of Angelo Po factory
Angelo Po started out producing cooking stoves, and it was in this sector in particular that the company first built its platform for success, becoming a benchmark for excellence on the world’s leading markets. The original guiding principles of specialization, quality and comprehensive customer service were soon harnessed for the development of an extended product range that enabled the company to provide customers with even more sophisticated kitchen installations.
area: What are the differences between the kitchen of a home and the industrial version? Do the two types of kitchens have to be seen in different lights? What gap separates these two types today, and what are the aspects that on the contrary bring them closer?
Rossella Po: The differences between a domestic kitchen and a professional one are, if we use the classical example of the car industry, the same as those separating a “utility car” from a “sports car”. While the home kitchen features essential equipment and accessories, as it is designed for the practical activities of everyday cooking, the professional kitchen is built to assure the best result in extreme situations, and to make it possible to repeat them in time. The power consumed, the electronics, the selection of the materials, easy cleaning and a study of ergonomics guide the development of the professional kitchen. It is configured on the basis of the customers’ needs, guaranteeing a choice of functional elements as for instance fryers, pasta cookers, fry-tops etc., which are not comparable to the kitchens designed for the home, where the choice of colours and materials may on the contrary prevail. At the same time the professional sector is, just as in the car industry, “contaminating” the domestic world, influencing its evolution. Equipment as the mixed oven, the temperature lowering device and electromagnetic induction have been developed for the professional sector, but are gaining a foothold in the domestic world. The domestic sector is also influencing a development in the professional one, in the spheres of design and energy consumption. Angelo Po has been one of the first companies in the sector to also pay attention to “beauty”. Our kitchens are created as exercises in style, thanks to the contribution of Italian designers, as witnessed by Omega, FX and Luxor. In fact, we have already received awards for the design and easy cleaning of the Omega kitchen, and we are also competing for the famous Compasso D’oro prize which was created in 1954 by ADI, the Industrial Design Association, with those of our products vaunting the most refined design, as the new FX mixed oven and the new Luxor display refrigerator. In the professional world, where performance and high power have always been coincident characteristics, one is today more and more ambitiously studying how to satisfy the customer by offering the best professional performance and at the same time protecting the environment, adopting an approach more inspired by a green economy, as Angelo Po has done with the new FX oven.
area: Your company has a long history and has been handed down from generation to generation; it has therefore witnessed profound changes in the way to ideate and build kitchens and their components, triggered by the more general evolutions of the society, culture and customs. What have the most important stages of this evolution been, and how have these transformations influenced your production?
R.P.: The history of Angelo Po is the history of a great passion. Begun in the years after World War I, as early as in 1922, when the young Angelo Po, the best blacksmith in town, built the first professional kitchen, it has continued until today when the fourth generation of the Po family head the company. The phases of this development tell the story of a company that has profound roots in the evolutions of design and culture of the Twentieth century.
1920 to the Thirties: the years of Liberty and Art Noveau. The forms of the first kitchens, which burned wood or coal, as for instance our “Carpigiana”, evoked nature and its curved and dynamic lines.
Forties and Fifties: the years of the war and rationalist functionality. The lines, dictated by the great architects as Le Courbousier, became geometric. The first community kitchens were created, with winch movements, and in the Fifties methane gas arrived (the years of Mattei and the ENI energy corporation)
Fifties and Sixties: the years of pop art and minimalism. Angelo Po realized the first modular kitchens, meeting the demands of the chefs. In those years a close relationship was established with those who use the equipment, and this cooperation has continued with excellent results until today. Those were the years of the boom of the international markets.
Eighties and Nineties: the years of the technological explosion. High-Tech characterized the development of the products; the first mixed ovens were made, and electronics were used for kitchen appliances.
The first decade of the 21st century: the approach to design has changed, the apparatuses are no longer the creations of a single designer but the results of a true and very precious cooperation between different fields of expertise.
Angelo Po has founded the most advanced research and development department in the sector. The designers outline the aesthetic lines of the products, and the curves have transmigrated from the car industry to kitchen equipment. Angelo Po launches a new kitchen designed for cooking before the eyes of the customers: Omega. Also this kind of kitchen, first of all motivated by a need for greater safety in cooking, is becoming more and more diffused as the stage of cooking shows, adapting to the changed role of the chef.
area: What role is played by design in your line of production? Do you avail yourselves of the consulting of architects and designers? Do you also cooperate with cooks or with those who use your products? How much do their requirements influence your production?
R.P.: Designers cooperate with our design department to create products that are beautiful and ergonomically functional. The Omega kitchen line with local centre, the FX mixed oven and the Luxor display cabinet are the results of a combination of skills, or in other words a cooperation between the design department and external designer.
We have worked together with chefs since the Seventies. Internationally known chefs as Marchesi, Aduriz, Berasategui, Colonna and many others, professionals dedicated to our research and presenters of our technologies are at work all over the world. We employ a chef in every principal market (6 plus collaborators hired for specific projects).
It is the chef who influences our decisions on the equipment. It is by following the advice of the chef that we can create products which make work in the kitchen more efficient, reducing the time required.
It is quite complex to design an efficient environment for professional work: it is much more than a matter of interior design and efficient apparatuses. It is necessary to know the food production processes and the regulations in force in the different countries, to predict the difficulties, choose the equipment which is best suited to make the most of the space and the time available.
The added value guaranteed by Angelo Po the result of the partnerships we form with our customers. We produce high-performance and elegant equipment, and we make it possible for our customers to work side by side with our chefs and technicians to realize a customized project which maximizes the product, reducing waste.
area: To what extent does technology, and above all the quality and choice of your materials, influence the results and the quality of your production?
R.P.: Technology has changed our world. Today it is possible even for non-professionals to turn out a high quality product thanks to artificial intelligence. The machine is replacing Man, more and more. In cooking, in the memorizing of the cooking process and in cleaning. Angelo Po is a brand characterized by certain and high quality, which has gradually become consolidated thanks to the experience and professionalism of these 88 long years of great history in the sector. Outstanding quality is a very ambitious goal: it calls for great attention to every detail and a painstaking control of the entire production cycle. From the control of the materials on arrival, in order to make sure they meet the very highest standards on arrival, to the documenting of all the activities and the specific responsibility of the operators involved, to the meticulous testing of every product. Any apparatus made by Angelo Po is identified by a registration number and accompanied by a document, a kind of diary. In the final production phase every machine is assigned to a single operator who is responsible for controlling and certifying that it is functions perfectly, who records the verifications and then signs the diary.
area: To what extent do the kitchens succeed in meeting the market demands?
R.P.: They meet every requirement, because every one of our products is designed to meet market requirements. In some aspects our equipment is sometimes too advanced for the use it is really put to. In fact, only a small circle of professionals are able to use certain cooking appliances.
area: What are the future scenarios and products of your company?
R.P.: We have many ongoing projects and ambitions, all of which are oriented in the same direction, namely that of the continuous professional and dimensional growth of the company, which is becoming more and more widely recognized as one of the most authoritative competitors on an international level, and we aim to export this excellent example of Italian design all over the world. Our mission is, and will always be, to meet the most sophisticated professional requirements, exploring the new territories of professional cooking, anticipating the new requirements and always placing ourselves at the service of the creativity of chefs and the success of their enterprises.
