Falling in love with excellence. Seeking it, recognizing it, studying it, promoting it. Building it a home, so that there is a place in which to find it again to let oneself, each time, be enchanted.

Polo del Gusto is the holding company that Riccardo Illy founded and has chaired since 2019, the culmination of a journey of research and dissemination of a new food culture and the values of superior quality undertaken since the early 2000s. It brings together brands of excellence from the agri-food sector that have in common "disruptive quality". It means that their excellence is recognizable by anyone, by instinct, and not only by expert palates; it means the use of raw materials of the highest quality available, a processing method that is different and incompatible compared to the one used by mass-market producers, and a massive commitment to sustainability. Today it includes Achillea, which produces fruit juices and soft drinks from 100% organic fruit and is based in Paesana (Cuneo); Dammann Frères, French maison of fine teas (Dreux, France); Domori, superfine chocolate (of None, Turin); and Pintaudi, biscuits and baked goods in Trieste.

If "disruptive quality" is the essential foundation of Polo del Gusto, the "theory of enchantment" is its consequence, and it is also the heart of the research on Made in Italy and on the peculiarities of doing business in Italy at the center of a series of lectures and in-depth analyses that Illy held as a lecturer for the international economics study center Italian Innovation, from which the book "The Art of Excellent Products" (HarperCollins Leadership, 2022) was later born, published in Italy by La Nave di Teseo with the title "L’arte dei prodotti eccellenti".

After having sought out and personally explored the places of excellent production, Illy created the map of how to do business according to this philosophy. In taste, from agri-food to wine, he found the beauty and coherence of Made in Italy, selected it, and gathered it in a place he called, almost with a play on words, "Incantalia", a multi-brand retail brand that since 2023 opens its shop windows in Trieste in via Einaudi 2/A, a few steps from the Teatro Verdi, in a casket where under the lights of a Murano chandelier the color of papaya dominates, the shapes are curved and welcoming, and everything is brought to eye level as an act of kindness towards those who enter to discover its secret. Here, the products of Polo del Gusto are joined by other brands that correspond to the principles of disruptive quality, from pasta to flours, from rice to tuna, to olive oil, to coffee.

The enchantment of the name is what generates the surprise: and the beautiful, like the good, is every time a new discovery. Recalling the importance of roots is the symbol chosen for the logo by Annamaria Testa, who oversaw the creation of the Incantalia Brand: the reinterpretation of a pictogram taken from an Etruscan plate of the fourth century BC to evoke conviviality, life that renews itself.