Heavy Duty
“Cuki’s mission is to innovate, offering solutions that meet consumers’ needs, improve their daily lives and reduce environmental impact.”
Telos: “Hand me the Domopak? Hand me the Cuki?” Whether you are talking about aluminium foil or plastic wrap, these names have become household words throughout Italy, showing just how valuable your products are to us. Could you tell us the story behind this success?
Corrado Ariaudo: It is a story of hard work, by the people who originally developed the products made by these brands. Then since 2006, it has become a story of the intense efforts to commercially relaunch them along with my collaborators through the complex industrial and financial restructuring of a conglomerate with different activities (at the time called Gruppo Comital) and several companies and plants in Italy and abroad (not just Cuki but also aluminium rolling companies, companies producing special fabrics and industrial filters, packaging, brooms and cleaning supplies, real-estate initiatives and so on) with no strategic denominator but all with heavy management losses. We implemented the restructuring plan to develop the food packaging business based on product quality and the Cuki and Domopak brands by valorising and closing down less strategic activities. This allowed the company to clear away areas of loss and recover financial resources so that management could begin thinking about more productive investments and the banking system could return to normal after going into over 200 million euros of financial debt.
Cuki is on the cutting edge in terms of innovation and sustainability. What key development projects, both in terms of products and technologies, are you working on?
Cuki’s mission is to innovate, by offering solutions that meet consumers’ needs, improve their daily lives and reduce environmental impact. Each new product and the relative technologies must be in line with a more sustainable future.
In terms of products, by offering the market aluminium containers made with recycled materials, freezers bags and plastic wrap made from compostable bioplastic, biodegradable and certified compostable oven paper and, for the food and restaurant sector, a range of products made of FSC-certified cardboard for takeaway foods that can be used in the freezer, oven and microwave.
Actually, Cuki is constantly working and investing in environmentally friendly design projects to optimise resources by reducing thicknesses, making packaging lighter and, in any case, improving mechanical resistance. This logic guiding the development of each product category fits well into the 4-Rs approach: reduce, reuse, recycle and recover. Technologically and industrially speaking, the company has invested in engineering software and energy efficiency systems to reduce consumption and emissions.
All of this hard work led in 2025 to Cuki being awarded a bronze EcoVadis medal issued by the international EcoVadis platform, recognising its sustainability performance and progress in the areas of environment, ethics, labour rights and sustainable acquisitions.
The battle against food waste is now seen as a fundamental value for society and environmental sustainability. How does Cuki contribute to facing this challenge?
Through constant commitment that combines product innovation, social responsibility and valuable partnerships with different initiatives, campaigns and projects. I’ll mention Cuki’s Save the Food program, which is one of its longest-lasting and most structured projects in the fight against waste in Italy, bringing together innovation, solidarity and the culture of responsible consumption. In fact, each year in Italy over 4.5 million tonnes of food that is still edible ends up in the garbage, totalling 14.1 billion euros (source: 2025 Waste Watcher International Observatory). Since 2011, Cuki Save the Food, in collaboration with Banco Alimentare and by contributing aluminium and thermal containers, has helped to recover over 25 million portions of unconsumed food from company cafeterias and from food surplus at supermarkets and delis and has distributed it to individuals and families in need.
Let’s talk a bit about you. At the beginning of your career, you worked for many years for Olivetti, then moved to the M&C investment firm and now this entrepreneurial investment in the relaunch of Cuki. Let’s look back. What experiences and decisions were crucial to your professional career and to the success of the companies you have led?
All of my experiences together have helped me develop the skills to take on responsibilities and difficulties, make rational choices quickly and manage them with determination. Speaking of my time with Olivetti, I had to handle complex scenarios and times of difficulty when restructuring was needed due to a decline in the IT industry in Europe. I also got to participate directly in exciting phases like the development of Omnitel, the first private telecommunications operator in Italy. My experience in M&C was also rather complex, with the credit crunch that changed all the financial paradigms in the private equity sector right at the beginning of their investment activities. After my experiences in the industrial and financial sector, I joined Gruppo Comital and decided to take my own risks and invest directly in the restructuring project that led to Cuki’s market success. Today Cuki has become a leading food packaging company with over 200 million in profits and 500 employees in plants in Italy, France and Turkey.
Editorial
Once upon a time there was a chicken.
Two kids frolicking around the city playing rugby, but instead of a ball, they are using a chicken wrapped in aluminium foil that they got from the store. They laugh and toss the chicken-ball back and forth as their game turns into a little adventure. In the end, the two boys take the chicken-ball to their mom, who starts making the chicken for dinner, always in the aluminium foil. That’s when the real rugby ball shows up, flying right at her. The mom unexpectedly catches the ball using the same aluminium foil… made by Cuki.
This Cuki commercial from the nineties called “Here's the chicken, kids” had the whole country in stitches, and in a very funny way, pointed out how food storage is serious business. But that ad campaign wasn’t the first. Ten years earlier, Cuki had already conquered TV screens and Italian kitchens with another commercial for “heavy duty” aluminium foil, a catchphrase that became synonymous with endurance, quality and reliability. We even stole it for the title of this interview. Seeing it again today, these two ads convey the same philosophy: lightness and strength, tradition and innovation, irony and concreteness. Two threads that still link Cuki’s history to its present.
Now, after decades, the world of food packaging is undergoing deep change. The new European regulations, with the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), approved in 2024, set ambitious goals to reduce the quantity of waste, boost recyclability and promote compostable or reusable materials. In this scenario, Cuki has not just fallen in line. It has done things ahead of schedule, developing products and processes in line with a more sustainable future. As confirmed by our October guest Corrado Ariaudo, the sole director of Cuki Cofresco Srl, in his interview for PRIMOPIANOSCALAc.
However, more than just technologically, Cuki is heavy duty when it comes to ethics. With the Project “Cuki Save the Food,” launched in 2011 along with Banco Alimentare, the company has transformed its products into tools of solidarity. A concrete gesture that highlights the coherence between its industrial mission and social responsibility: protect what is precious, from food to human dignity.
This is even confirmed in the report Fragili Equilibri by ActionAid, published last July, shedding light on a widespread, cross-cutting and largely hidden reality. Today over four million families are at risk for food poverty. Within a context where all prices are going up – in 2023 food prices rose by 9.8 percent – food is the first thing people cut. An inevitable choice that leads to exclusion, not just among the poor but also among workers and middle-income families.
There is one other human trait that distinguishes Corrado Ariaudo and the Cuki spirit: sober-mindedness. After the interview, when we asked Corrado for a photo other than the one he sent us for the cover, his answer was simple and disarming: “I don’t have any other photos in my electronic archive and I wouldn’t know how to get you one. I’ve never been interested in promoting myself.” We’re not surprised. Words of a man from another time. More interested in facts that in appearances.
Red, black and white: the traditional colours of Telos Analisi & Strategie are back in the 2025 cover graphics of PRIMOPIANOSCALAc. We reveal our guest’s identity by showing half of their face on one side and a quote from the interview on the other. Their name is written in Abril Fatface, a classy font inspired by 19th-century European advertising posters.
Mariella Palazzolo
Corrado Ariaudo is the sole administrator of Cuki Cofresco Srl.
He began his professional career with Ernst & Young. In 1986 he joined Olivetti, where he worked for seventeen years in Italy and abroad as the head of restructuring projects, as auditing director, in investor relations, as Group Director of Administration, Finance and Control, up to General Director.
He left Olivetti in late 2002 when Telecom Italia and Olivetti merged and undertook some entrepreneurial initiatives. In 2005 he took part in setting up, directly invested in and organised fundraising for market capitalisation, with a view to listing on the stock exchange, for M&C, an investment company he managed for five years.
In 2010 he gave up his executive powers at M&C and invested directly in the control shares of the former Comital SpA, now Cuki Cofresco Srl. He took over the executive powers of the company and launched a rebalancing plan that led to the development and relaunch of Cuki as a market leader in food packaging.
Born in Ivrea in 1960, Ariaudo has a degree in economics and business from the University of Turin. He is married to Carla and has a daughter who is a surgeon and lives in Switzerland with her husband and eight-month-old grandson. He even has two dogs.
He loves running and riding his mountain bike. He takes care of green spaces in his hometown and at the preschool his family owns. With his usual irony, for a hobby he called “secondary,” he travels to “cultivate some interests that aren’t exactly profitable in Brazil.”