Family-owned Marconi has been making giardiniera that tops your Italian beef for more than a century

Most everyone is familiar with the phrase, “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made.” But that doesn’t necessarily apply to toppings such as giardiniera, the quintessential Chicago mélange that adorns a well-dressed beef/sausage combo.

For more than a century, Marconi Foods, a family-owned purveyor in Des Plaines, has been making that giardiniera, and recently opened up its factory doors to show just how it’s done.

“Pickles, carrots, celery, cauliflower and peppers — that’s it,” said Jeff Johnson, 44, president and fourth-generation scion of V. Formusa, the parent company of Marconi. “We’re just mixing and repacking. It’s a simple process.”

Derived from the Italian word for garden, Chicago-style giardiniera is a veggie medley cured in vinegar and packed in oil, with a satisfyingly crunchy flavor profile ranging from briny to tangy to hot. The condiment of choice for Italian beef, it is perhaps the most fun way to eat your vegetables.

Founded in 1898 as an Italian foods importer, V. Formusa has evolved its Marconi brand into one of the largest manufacturers of giardiniera in the U.S., with Portillo’s topping its client list. Marconi’s unassuming northwest suburban factory is certainly the nexus of the Chicago-style giardiniera universe.

“We are definitely the OG of giardiniera,” said Joey Schramm, 48, Johnson’s sister and vice president of V. Formusa. “We are the original.”

Still very much a family affair, Johnson and Schramm’s father, Bob Johnson, serves as CEO, overseeing the business started by his grandfather, Vincent Formusa, who named the signature brand after Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio — ostensibly with the famed Italian engineer’s blessing.

In 2014, V. Formusa moved from its longtime home on Grand Avenue in Chicago to Des Plaines, setting up shop in a 25,000-square-foot red brick factory in a small industrial cluster off I-90, where 20 employees work the floor in a single shift six days a week.

The lobby is rich with family flavor, featuring awards bestowed on Formusa from the Italian government, historic photos, mementos and a wooden table displaying an array of current Marconi offerings, including its signature giardiniera.

The factory produces 2 million pounds of giardiniera a year, made from huge barrels of cut and cured pickles, carrots, celery, cauliflower and peppers, the latter ingredient differentiating the hot and mild varieties.

The veggies are poured into a giant vat and mixed by hand with something resembling a dustpan. The smell is both appetizing and potent, the air heavy with peppers that keep the factory in a constant fog of aromatic tear gas.

The giardiniera is then sent in large buckets to another assembly line where the finished product is deposited in 16-ounce bottles for retail sale at Jewel, Mariano’s, Walmart, Target and other stores, mostly in Chicago and the Great Lakes region.

Larger containers are used to distribute to food-service clients like Portillo’s, which goes through “hundreds of thousands of pounds” of giardiniera per year, Schramm said.

A longtime partner, Portillo’s has grown from a Villa Park hot dog stand into a chain with 109 restaurants in 11 states, all of which serve Marconi giardiniera as a topping for Italian beef sandwiches and other Chicago staples.

“They move a lot of product, for sure,” Jeff Johnson said.

Marconi also sold giardiniera at the original Potbelly sandwich shop on Lincoln Avenue back when it opened in the late 1970s, although the expansive Chicago-based chain is no longer a customer.

But the breakthrough restaurant that established Marconi giardiniera as an essential condiment was Johnnie’s Beef in Elmwood Park, adding “sweet or hot” to the ordering lexicon for Chicago sandwich cognoscenti more than a half century ago.

“The first one I sold directly was Johnnie’s Beef on North Avenue,” said Bob Johnson, 77. “In fact, not only did he put the giardiniera on his sandwiches, but he had our quarts with the Marconi label on the shelf that he sold outright.”

The elder Johnson said the giardiniera recipe has been tweaked a little since he started in the family business in 1973. For one, the company switched to domestic rather than imported Italian vegetables for the mix, determining that “a carrot is a carrot,” he said.

A bigger change was making the giardiniera pieces smaller as its primary use shifted to sandwiches.

“The cut of the vegetables was larger because it was mostly used as an antipasto,” Bob Johnson said. “That was before Italian beef really got popular.”

Annual sales now top $10 million per year, split evenly between food service and retail. While Marconi offers other products including salad dressings and pasta sauces, giardiniera and peppers represent about 75% of the business.

And while the Chicago market accounts for about 70% of total sales, Marconi giardiniera is gaining traction in such places as Florida, Arizona, Texas and California, boosted by everything from the expansion of Portillo’s to social media and the popularization of Italian beef through TV shows like “The Bear.”

Marconi also is employing TV advertising to supplement word-of-mouth from Chicago expatriates in the Sun Belt, Jeff Johnson said.

“The outer markets are really our fastest-growing segment right now,” he said. “We have marketing systems in place to get the word out in the areas where we’re picking up new distribution, and the product sells itself.”

While sales are increasing and the geographic reach of giardiniera is expanding, Marconi is content with organic growth — at least for now, Johnson said.

Marconi has resisted overtures from private equity firms, which have shown a growing appetite to invest in the food industry. Portillo’s, for example, sold to private equity firm Berkshire Partners in 2014, ushering in a period of rapid expansion.

But Portillo’s, which went public in 2021, has struggled in recent years with sluggish sales, and last month laid off 18% of its Oak Brook-based corporate workforce.

With its own Des Plaines corporate headquarters still mostly populated by descendants of Vincent Formusa, Marconi wants to stay a family-owned business for the foreseeable future.

“If someone comes in and wants to make that type of investment, they’re going to look for things that might compromise the brand or compromise what we’re doing. We’re a little bit reluctant to do that,” Jeff Johnson said. “We have a nice thing going here. I get to see my parents and my sister on a daily basis, and who we have to answer to essentially is just our customers.”

rchannick@chicagotribune.com