Face to face with: ZANELLA | SANA Partner

January 2026

We are an artisanal bakery from Bologna, active since 1964 and now specialized in organic baked goods. We combine tradition and innovation, creating simple crackers, breadsticks, and snacks. Our mission is to offer products that are tasty, transparent, and sustainable, also valorizing ingredients recovered from virtuous supply chains.

What inspired your participation in SANA Food 2026, and what goals or expectations are guiding you in this new edition?

Participating in SANA Food 2026 comes naturally to us, as we have been attending this fair for many years. It gives us the opportunity to be seen and recognized by our long-standing clients, meet new ones, and engage directly with the market. It is also a valuable moment to “feel” the trends in the sector, presenting our traditional offerings as well as new products that respond to emerging consumer demands, while networking and exchanging ideas with other entrepreneurs in the industry.

Today’s consumers are increasingly conscious about health and well-being. How has this awareness influenced your production choices or inspired new product concepts? 

Today’s consumers are increasingly attentive to health and wellness, and this has always guided our production choices. For us, it means creating simple, clean, and organic products made with a few high-quality ingredients, favoring Italian flours and nutrient-rich components. This awareness has also inspired us to valorize raw materials that would otherwise be considered waste, such as okara and brewers’ spent grain, turning them into nutritious food resources. In this way, we can offer tasty, healthy, and sustainable products that meet the needs of those seeking a balanced diet and environmentally conscious consumption.

Tradition and innovation often go hand in hand in a company’s growth journey. How do you manage to honor your roots while giving them a contemporary interpretation?

We respect tradition by maintaining the ancient foundations of our methods, while embracing what innovation discovers and produces. We introduced organic raw materials only once they were certified and available on the market. Similarly, we now use sustainable ingredients that would previously have been discarded, as well as ancient or little-known raw materials in Italy, rediscovering their nutritional and functional value.

Transparency, sustainability, and traceability have become essential values in today’s market. How do you bring these principles to life in your distribution practices?

Traceability is ensured and verified through the controls of the organic certification body, while transparency comes from the simplicity of our recipes, which always feature a clean label. Sustainability is reflected in our choice of suppliers with short supply chains, reducing waste, and valorizing ingredients recovered from virtuous supply chains, ensuring products that are high-quality, safe, and environmentally responsible.