When the first lockdown hit in 2020, dried pasta, tinned tomatoes and blocks of Parmigiano Reggiano were among the first products to vanish from UK supermarket shelves, faster even than bread. It wasn’t panic. It was priority. Britain has been quietly obsessed with Italian food for a very long time, and in a crisis, people reach for what they trust. YouGov has named Italian cuisine the most popular in the world, with 91% of British people who have tried it saying they like it. For any Italian food brand weighing up the UK market, that’s one of the strongest tailwinds going in FMCG.

At jellybean we work closely with Italian brands including Mutti, Rio Mare and Coco di Mama in the UK, everything from press and influencer relations through to shopper marketing, social media, experiential, PR and retailer activation, and we keep coming back to the same question. Why does this particular cuisine land so hard with British consumers, and what does it actually take to turn that goodwill into market share?

Two thousand years in the making

Britain’s appetite for Italian food didn’t start with Jamie Oliver or Pizza Express. The Romans brought olive oil and vinegar with them in 55BC, and 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys is said to have buried his Parmesan cheese in the garden to save it from the Great Fire of London in 1666. The modern chapter began later, with Italian immigrants opening cafes and ice cream parlours in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then the Soho trattorias and espresso bars of the 1950s, then cheap package holidays in the 1960s that gave a generation of Brits their first taste of proper carbonara on Italian soil. Each wave left an indelible imprint behind. Pasta, pizza and coffee stopped being foreign and became fixtures of the British table.

Why UK demand for Italian food keeps growing

Three forces are doing the heavy lifting in the UK right now. The first is money. With household budgets under pressure, shoppers are trading up within categories rather than trading out of them altogether, and Italian ambient food, tomatoes, pasta, olive oil, canned tuna sits right in that affordable treat space. The second is travel. British spending on trips to Italy hit around €2.4 billion in the first half of 2025, up over 10% year on year, and increasingly Brits are skipping the obvious spots for Puglia, Calabria and other regions once considered off the beaten track. Puglia holiday bookings alone were up 28% year on year, according to one specialist tour operator’s figures.

The third is that Italian is having a sustained moment online. On TikTok, the #pasta hashtag has racked up somewhere in the region of 15.8 billion views, and #italian alone accounts for roughly 27 billion views across 1.3 million posts. None of that view count converts to sales by itself, but it’s fertile ground for any brand willing to authentically show up in it.

Many of us on the jellybean team have made trips to Italy this year, and it’s no coincidence that over half the office are planning to visit in the next 12 months. Every trip comes back with a new craving, and every craving eventually finds its way to a supermarket shelf and into our homes.

Mutti: how one Italian food brand disrupted the market

We started working with Mutti in 2020 and we’re delighted to be partners in its continued growth and success story. From little known tomato brand in the UK back then, to the tomato brand that everyone is talking about. Its distribution, share and brand awareness has climbed rapidly which has been no small achievement in a highly commoditised category. It’s proof that a single-minded focus on producing quality tomatoes, executed and communicated well, is a growth strategy rather than just a nice story on the label.

As an example in May this year, we ran the Mutti Pasta Sauce Tour, seven cities in seven weeks, London, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh, launched with chef Gennaro Contaldo at a live event in Battersea and built to put the brand’s pasta sauce range directly into shoppers’ hands and mouths. The full case study is here. In recent weeks, members of the jellybean team were out in Parma during this year’s tomato harvest, working with Mutti’s key press, influencer ambassadors and VIP contacts to experience Mutti first-hand and to powerfully bring that story back to the UK.

Rio Mare and Coco di Mama: two more Italian success stories

Jellybean client Rio Mare, canned tuna has made a similar bet on premiumisation, launching its largest ever UK marketing campaign this year across TV, digital and out of home, built around getting British consumers to discover proper Italian tuna rather than the tin they grew up with. We’ve backed that with social media, an influencer programme and in-store sampling, including an activation at Waitrose Bluewater that set new sales records.

Coco di Mama, has taken a different route into the same appetite and is one of the UK’s favourite Italian Food to Go choices. Earlier this year we created and ran Made to Be Craved, the brand’s first ever outdoor media campaign. We handled the creative and the media buy, alongside sampling and press activity to bring the campaign to life. What started as one pasta counter on Fleet Street in 2011 is now a nationwide food-to-go brand with more than 2,700 points of sale, including food to go listings in Tesco and Sainsbury’s, proving that authentic Italian doesn’t have to mean slow or expensive to be believable.

What this means if you’re looking to grow an Italian brand in the UK

Three different brands but with one shared insight. British consumers already want to believe in Italian food. The brands that win here aren’t inventing demand, they’re giving people a reason to trust a specific brand name over another and trade up from own label. That’s the job in front of any Italian food or drink brand looking at the UK next, and it’s the work we absolutely love doing the most.

If you’re bringing an Italian brand into the UK, or trying to grow one that’s already here, we’d like to talk.

Say Ciao to neil@jellybeancreative.co.uk

 

Neil Brenson
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