Learning to become a better manager, not only a better baker, is a long road. You can serve the best bread and the best cakes you have ever seen, but you can also be an awful entrepreneur. That’s why COAP, an italian co-op, has invited its members for the second year in a row to attend the “Sirpa Academy”, an advanced school of management training dedicated to catering and bakery professionals.
“A company’s competitiveness” — stresses Fabrizio Fabbri, ceo of Coap — “also depends on careful management – of costs, raw materials, personnel, and the ability to seize market trends in order to attract new customer segments”.
Management control, marketing, sales, communication, e-commerce, social media, teamwork, customer and trade relations: these are some of the topics addressed by the lessons. Some of the students own a bakery, some of them are food professionals or workers of the co-operative. All of them are now considered part of the school’s alumni association, the so-told “Sirpa Club”. Three of them have been awarded as top tiers in their class.
Coap is a trading and supply cooperative among food service professionals based in Forlì, Italy. Founded in 1959, its purpose is to cut the purchasing cost of raw materials for its members. Today it has about 350 members in Emilia-Romagna and stocks more than 2,00 products. Forecast turnover for 2023 is about 16 milion euros.