The story of our company is linked with the story of our family. My father, EUGENIO BREZZI, founder of the family business, discovered truffles in the Twenties when his grandfather Pietro took him to collect pine kernels in the Tuscan Maremma area. In those long days of work, my father’s attention was caught by a man roaming the pinewoods with his dog who seemed to be searching for a hidden treasure. Driven by the curiosity of a child and naturally adventurous, he followed the “odd couple” until he saw the dog suddenly stop, start to scrape away the earth, barking happily. Patting the dog, the man bent down and picked up something, both of them looking very pleased with themselves at their find. My father crept nearer and took a good look at the remains of the precious find, saving some small pieces of what turned out to be a precious, fragrant truffle. Wanting to emulate what he had seen as a game to play but also with instinctive insight, he gave these pieces to his dog Lola to smell and then began to hide them, rewarding Lola when she found them. And this is how the story of the “little big truffle hunter” began.

As the years rolled on, from a simple truffle hunter, my father began to buy and sell truffles from other truffle hunters. The family business got off to a good start again after the second World War and boomed. One of the biggest problems was in marketing the large quantities of truffles, as they were far more abundant in those days. If on the one side it was relatively easy to sell the biggest and best truffles to restaurants, it was harder to sell the small ones, even though the quality was exactly the same; so father had the idea of using the smaller truffles to prepare a cream to sell when truffles were out of season and by adding a drop of olive oil and a pinch of salt  to preserve it, in 1946 he created the first creamed truffle in the world!

This new product was on great demand from restaurants and later from delicatessens and food retailers. He then started to preserve whole truffles in boxes and jars. Our family business has remained loyal to father’s original idea and we have chosen to retain a small traditional family run business using simple, entirely natural  work processes without any chemical additives or flavours.