Double anniversary for the Gruppo Cimbali than this year celebrates 110 years since its foundation and at the same time 10 years since the birth of Mumac – its business museum – the largest permanent exhibition dedicated to the history, world and culture of professional espresso coffee machines.

The company, founded in 1912, has grown steadily over the course of over a century, becoming the multinational it is today: a group among the world’s leading manufacturers of professional espresso coffee machines. Since the end of the 1940s, an articulated export has allowed Gruppo Cimbali to bring espresso coffee all over the world and discover other markets, other cultures, other ways of drinking coffee and conceiving it. The company is organized into a performing and effective industrial system: 4 plants in Northern Italy and 1 plant in the USA, 2 commercial branches in Italy and 11 branches abroad and a distribution network in over 100 countries.

A all-Italian reality which has grown over the years, exporting that know-how and entrepreneurial ability abroad, characterized by a constant commitment to innovation, product and service, and to environmental and social sustainability.

“Our long history has allowed us to gather an enormous wealth of experience in the sector, which is essential to continue to feed curiosity over time and develop the ability to see. However, only innovation has allowed us to realize our projects and grow on the market ”he comments Maurizio Cimbali, president of the company and grandson of the founder. “Today, this innovation cannot ignore the logic of 360 ° sustainability, and this is the aspect in which Gruppo Cimbali will continue to invest”, he continues.

The history of the Gruppo Cimbali is to be told, from opening in 1912 of a small workshop for copper processing in via Caminadella, in the center of Milan, to the acquisition, in 1930, of a company specializing in the production of espresso machines and the consequent creation of Ditta Giuseppe Cimbali. Innovative, quality and design-conscious espresso coffee machines. Over the years the company has grown with the acquisitions of Faema, Casadio, Slayer and Keber.

There drive towards innovation, together with internationalization and sustainability, has always been one of the key elements of Gruppo Cimbali’s philosophy. Over 60 professionals from the R&D department work every day to design and develop high performance machines. All activities are carried out in-house and are reflected in the 66 patents that the company currently owns, 19 of which have been filed in the last three years. One significant fact should be underlined: the investment planned in 2023 on product development is over 5% of turnover.

Gruppo Cimbali has worked on some cutting-edge sustainable technologies, also presented during the Host 2021 fair, which improve the performance of the machine by containing their environmental impact and enhancing the skills of the professional. Hence the ‘Electronic Nose’ (winner of the Smau 2021 Innovation Award), a software capable of identifying mixtures through an Artificial Intelligence algorithm; and, again, the touchless interaction with Cup4you – Evo, the application that, through a Wi-Fi connection, offers a new interaction with the super-automatic machines, Art.IN.Coffee.

Sustainability is the red thread that connects all the activities that Gruppo Cimbali offers, from products to services, from innovations to technologies. A serious commitment was made and declared on the issues of the United Nations 2030 agenda, dedicating itself to concrete and measurable activities on the four specific sustainable development goals: planet, people, product, partnership.

For Gruppo Cimbali this means concretely: people, that is occupational safety, social projects and culture promotion with the involvement of local communities; product, i.e. sustainable packaging, energy saving and life cycle assessment; partnership and planet, including awareness-raising projects on global environmental issues, processes for offices and plants and finally – of course – sustainability in the coffee supply chain. In particular, we want to underline the important investment for the expansion of photovoltaics, which in 2023 will be € 600,000, planning to triple the installed power to meet approximately 50% of the energy needs.

In July of this year, the first sustainability report with the aim of having the first balance sheet in 2023. Gruppo Cimbali is at the forefront on this front, from the health of workers to the commitment to reduce waste, from the use of recyclable materials to the application of technologies avant-garde green, up to constant collaboration with other realities to achieve common goals.

110 years offer the occasion for the restyling of Mumac, a cultural hub formed by Mumac – Museum of the coffee machine, with the exhibition of the Cimbali and Maltoni collections, Mumac Library, the Historical Coffee Library, Mumac Academy, a place for training and dissemination of coffee culture, Hangar 100, a multifunctional annex for temporary exhibitions. Opened in 2012, the museum is renewed from an exhibition point of view to also accommodate new collectible machines.

“We are very proud to celebrate today the ten years of Mumac which is not only our business museum but over time has become a point of reference for all coffee, collecting and design enthusiasts” he comments Fabrizia Cimbali, CEO of Gruppo Cimbali. “For this tenth birthday we wanted a restyling of the spaces and the exhibition path to meet the most evolved needs of today’s visitor and therefore to be even more attractive to the public”, he continues.

The reorganization project of the museum, entrusted to the designers Antonella Andriani and Ambrogio Rossari, was developed according to five key principles that make it possible to renew the virtuous encounter between the technological avant-garde of machines and the pleasure of coffee: “Responsibility, harmony , inclusiveness, usability and interaction were the guidelines that governed the entire project of revisiting the Mumac exhibition space with a view to becoming more and more a museum for everyone, with an eye to corporate responsibility, both social and cultural. ”Explains Barbara Foglia, Mumac manager.

The reopening of the Mumac to the public took place on Sunday 23 October with an extraordinary opening from 10.30 to 13.00 and from 16.30 to 19.30, on the occasion of the second edition of Museocity inTOUR, the initiative that promotes the discovery of the Lombard territory through itinerant visits of important heritage cultural unknown to most.