Knodus S.r.l.
www.knodus.it
Italy
Sector: Food Industry
My name is Raffaello Negro and I am one of the four owners of Knodus Srl. Though the name sounds vaguely Latin, it is made up of two different words: Canederlo and Knödel, which means indeed canederlo in German. Knodus Srl was founded in 2008 and focuses on the production of typical South Tyrolean dishes.
The company is located in Valle Aurina, a beautiful valley not far from Brunico in South Tyrol, the land of Canederlo. During the Napoleon’s invasion, since it was very hard for farmers to keep up with the sowing harvest, they came up with a recipe made with stale bread mixed with milk and eggs. And that’s how Canederlo, Knodus Srl’s top product, first came to life.
What we carry out is an artisanal activity focused on the making of typical products of the South Tyrol area. With a 600 thousand Euro revenue, the company counts 4 employees in the production department who make 1 ton of product per week.
Knodus Srl offers a vast range of Canederli made with different ingredients: speck, spinach, finferlo and red beetroot. Our flagship though is the cheese Canederli, which indeed make up for the largest part of the turnover. Besides these versions, our Knodus Srl product line includes:
- Spatzle: small dumplings with spinach and eggs;
- Strangola preti: stale bread, eggs and ricotta cheese dumplings;
- Mezzelune: ricotta cheese and spinach tortelli.
Our newest creation is the Orzotto: a barley risotto with speck and veggies and it is already available in the Large-Scale Retail Trade as a valid ready-meal alternative on the market.
We have always been very much committed to choosing top quality and fresh ingredients for our products, which has led the company to seal a deal with the The Speck Alto Adige Consortium. And for this reason, we use only speck IGP in our Canederli and for the Orzotto we also only use Parmigiano Reggiano DOP.
The largest source of income comes from the North of Italy, especially in the regions of Trentino, Veneto, Friuli and Lombardy where there’s an important distribution net. However, over the last years Knodus Srl has been expanding also to some facilities in the suburbs of Germany.
This is a highly seasonal job: we work very hard in autumn and winter. Not to mention then the increase in the demand of Knodus products during the summer months, especially in July, as loads of tourists visit the South Tyrol area.
The challenge for Knodus Srl
Over the years, the market has recognised the passion we put into our jobs and the quality of our products.
And as the volume of sales increased, we needed to find a solution that would allow us to boost our production while maintaining high quality and craftmanship standards.
The solution
Thanks to Firex solutions we have managed to go from working 88 lb to 441 lb of product per hour.
Firex comes mostly in handy with the production of spinach and egg Spatzle, which amounts at 1 ton each week.
Since when we uploaded and saved our recipes on the software of the machine, we have noticed a significant increase and improvement in the performance and the staff is not as much engaged in operational activities but instead focuses more on controlling the whole process. A great part of the job is still done manually, but should we keep growing in the future, we will increase our cooking line with other Firex machines.
Future
For the years to come, we aim at growing bigger and bring to the market new products that tell the story of our territory and represent our traditions.
We want to provide our customers with high-quality and quickly-ready products that will bring them back to the Valley in South Tyrol where they spent their last holidays.
Artisans and innovative machines: a great combo to be more efficient. Should we keep growing in the future, we will increase our cooking line adding other Firex machines.
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