Francesco Cirio

Who was Francesco Cirio?

Francesco Cirio was an Italian businessman and the inventor of canned vegetables and meat.

He was born in Nizza Monferrato, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, to a poor and illiterate family. When he was 14 years old he came to the capital of the kingdom, Turin. A few years later he invented canned vegetables and meat because he wanted to export food from the Piedmont.

At the end of the year 1856, he created his own company in order to produce these canned vegetables and meat and obtained several prizes at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The company was transformed in 1885 into Societa Anonima di Esportazione Agricola Francesco Cirio in Turin. This company very soon opened subsidiaries in Milan, Naples, Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris, and Vienna. For the rest of his life, Cirio worked at boosting the agricultural development of Southern Italy.