On the plains of Lombardy, they breed some of the finest pork in Europe. Naturally it has become the source of Italy’s finest salumi: prosciutto, mortadella, salami itself. And amongst major salumi producers, none has maintained its quality longer than the Levoni family.

Unfortunately, even in the home of good food that is Italy, many stores and customers had forgotten the difference between ordinary, mass-produced salumi and the real thing, like Levoni.

So the family sought advice on how to make its brand gain currency in this strange new market, where quality seemed less and less well understood. Levoni saw that it needed a brand story.

Thus it was that brandstory set out to explore what made Levoni so consistently successful. It saw the finest pigs being bred and fed. It smelt the natural embers used in curing Levoni hams. It lunched the gastronomic supplier of Italy’s top restaurants and found only Levoni was trusted to breed the rarest pigs. And it met the family, tracing the company’s origins to its very beginning.

Where lesser producers and retailers had traced a downward spiral in price and quality, brandstory found more recent trends running counter. A movement back to provenance, individuality, quality, was under way both at home and abroad, promising rich commercial benefits if Levoni maintained its standards.

Fortunately, the family showed no inclination to bend or trim its standards at all. Indeed the overriding trait of each Levoni was a completely serious, stubborn, table-thumping approach to compromise. Quite simply, this family was not for turning.

One question, however, no-one had been able to answer. Why was it that the family had chosen for its visual identity a pig with wings? And such a light-hearted symbol for such a serious enterprise?

The exploration provided brandstory with its answer and its story. The pig with wings was a fantasy, an impossibility: as likely as a Levoni compromising the family’s standards. As such it was a reminder to all and sundry, employee and customer alike, that Levoni stood for constant quality in a changing world.

Equally the brand story of the pig with wings could only be told with a smile, because good food may be a serious business but its true goal is pleasure.

So it is that more people now understand what sets Levoni apart, after all its years in business, and why it boasts a pig with wings on its messages. As the brand rejects compromise, so the business continues to grow, consistently.