Francesco Illy (entrepreneur, 1892)

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Ferenc Illy, 1920
Replica of the Illeta espresso machine

Francesco Illy (born October 7, 1892 as Ferenc Illy in Temesvár , † 1956 in Trieste ) was an Italian and Austro-Hungarian entrepreneur.

Life

Francesco Illy belongs to the ethnic group of the German-born Banat Swabians . His father was Magyar , his mother German . He spent all of his childhood in his native city, which gave him honorary citizenship three years after his death.

After studying economics in Timisoara, which he began at the age of 16, he went to Vienna to work for a Transylvanian company. After 1918 he settled in Trieste , where one of his sisters was already living. There he met his wife Vittoria, called Doris, and married her. Born in Johannesburg, with an Irish mother and father from Trieste, she was a concert pianist and employed as a private teacher by Francesco's sister. The port city with its cosmopolitan and prosperous milieu was an important base for trade and economy. Francesco initially worked in the spice and cocoa trade, and later also in the coffee trade.

One of his special achievements is the preservation of roasted coffee . In 1932 he achieved the decisive production step with the overprinting process. To do this, he filled the roasted coffee in tin cans, removed the oxygen from them and replaced it with nitrogen . As a result, the coffee beans retained their desired aroma for a long time. In 1934 he applied for a patent for the process. He developed his prototype of an espresso machine, the Illeta , in 1934/35. This device never exceeded the brewing temperature of 90 degrees Celsius in order to avoid undesirable burns of the grist due to the escape of oils from the grist at high temperatures. In addition to the brewing pressure, the machines also worked with a compressed air system that generated steam pressure. However, this technology could not prevail.

In 1933 he founded the Illycaffè company in a 50/50 partnership with Hermann Hausbrandt , owner of the Hausbrandt brand .

Francesco's son Ernesto (1925–2008) married his wife Anna Rossi in 1952 and, after Francesco's death in the early 1960s, took over the management of the company, which he headed until 2005. His son Francesco, in turn, has got the first name of his father and works in the third generation of the family dynasty, which includes a number of other family members.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Antonio Tencati: Profile of a Company . In: Progressive Business Models: Creating Sustainable and Pro-Social Enterprise , Springer-Verlag , 2017
  2. ^ A b c Daniel Onea, Dora Mihălcescu: Francesco Illy - the espresso inventor with Banat roots . Radio România Internaţional, celebrities from Romania, February 16, 2016
  3. ↑ The overprint process, an Illy-exclusive technology . Illy.com, 2010
  4. ↑ a b The story of the Illy family. On: amici.com
personal data
SURNAME Illy, Francesco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Illy, Ferenc (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian and Austro-Hungarian entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Timisoara
DATE OF DEATH 1956
Place of death Trieste