Barilla Pasta’s Turnaround From Homophobia to National Pride

On a warm September evening in 2013, Claudio Colzani drove his Audi the 100 or so miles from Milan to Parma, home for almost two centuries to the world’s largest pasta empire. He had joined Barilla SpA as chief executive officer less than a year before and was on his way to a dinner with its chairman, Guido Barilla, who was giving a live interview on national station Radio 24. As the sun edged lower in his rearview mirror, Colzani turned up the volume and listened as his boss walked the hosts through the company’s family heritage—its spaghettis and sauces. Then Barilla dropped a bombshell he would spend half a decade atoning for.

“I would never do a commercial with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect, but because we don’t agree with them,” Barilla said on Italy’s best-known radio talk show. If gay customers didn’t like that, they could go buy another brand of pasta, he said. Barilla, who together with his three siblings owns 85 percent of the company’s shares and holds an individual stake worth about $1.1 billion, extolled the values of the “classic family” that the brand targeted. The chairman, who turned 60 last year and has five children, further clarified that he opposed adoption by gay parents.