For decades, the standard playbook for an Italian company entering the North American market looked the same regardless of sector: find a distributor, build export volume, maybe open a small sales office once revenue justified it. Two deals announced in recent weeks suggest that playbook is no longer the only, or even the fastest, route in.
In early September, Parma-based Barilla Group agreed to acquire Goodles, the Santa Cruz, California mac-and-cheese brand that has spent four years chipping away at Kraft’s dominance of the category with a “better-for-you,” higher-protein product line. Around the same time, Poggipolini, the Bologna-area aerospace fastener specialist, closed its acquisition of Saturn Fasteners, a Burbank, California manufacturer of specialty and standard fasteners for the aerospace industry, its second U.S. acquisition after picking up Houston Precision Fasteners in 2024.
On the surface, these are two unrelated deals in two unrelated industries. Looked at together, they describe the same underlying strategy: rather than exporting into North America and waiting for the market to come to them, Italian companies are increasingly buying their way into it.
Two deals, one pattern
Barilla–Goodles: buying consumer relevance. Goodles didn’t need Barilla’s help to make pasta, it needed shelf space, trust, and velocity in a category where an incumbent (Kraft) still controls more than a third of spend. Goodles has grown its share of the U.S. shelf-stable mac-and-cheese market from under 1% to nearly 8% in three years, and drives real incrementality for retailers: a large share of its buyers are new to the category altogether. For Barilla, the acquisition isn’t primarily about factories or supply chain, it’s about acquiring a brand that already has the retail relationships, consumer following, and category momentum a European company would otherwise need years to build organically in the U.S. market. Goodles keeps its Santa Cruz headquarters, its team, and its CEO; Barilla buys distribution and cultural fluency it couldn’t easily replicate through exporting pasta under its own name.
Poggipolini–Saturn: buying capability and proximity. The logic in aerospace is almost the inverse. Poggipolini isn’t chasing a consumer brand—it’s chasing physical presence inside a supply chain where roughly 80% of global aerospace demand originates in the United States, and where being close to major manufacturers matters as much as price or quality. Saturn Fasteners gives Poggipolini a second U.S. manufacturing base, on top of Houston Precision Fasteners acquired in 2024, along with specialized know-how in externally threaded aerospace fasteners and existing customer relationships on the West Coast. This is a company using acquisition to become, in its own words, a genuine North American manufacturer rather than an Italian exporter serving North American customers from a distance.
Exporting in, or buying in?
The two deals map onto a decision every Italian SME or mid-sized company eventually faces when North America starts to matter: do you export into the market, or do you buy a foothold inside it?
Exporting—through a distributor, agent, or joint venture, keeps capital exposure low and lets a company test demand before committing. It’s the right first step for many companies, and it remains the dominant mode of entry for Italian SMEs. But it comes with real limits: distributors control the customer relationship, retail buyers can be slow to trust an unfamiliar import, and in regulated or safety-critical sectors like aerospace, being an offshore supplier can be a genuine competitive disadvantage against companies manufacturing on the customer’s doorstep.
Acquisition solves a different problem for each of these companies. Barilla didn’t need manufacturing capacity in the U.S., it needed a brand North American shoppers already trust. Poggipolini didn’t need brand recognition, it needed a factory floor and a customer list inside the American aerospace supply chain. In both cases, the acquisition bought something exporting simply can’t: an existing position inside the market, on day one, rather than a multi-year runway to build one.
Why this matters for Italian companies weighing Canada or the U.S.
Not every company has Barilla’s balance sheet or Poggipolini’s acquisition experience, this is the fourth or fifth U.S. deal for a group that has been building a deliberate transatlantic platform for years. But the underlying question these deals pose is relevant at almost any scale: is the goal to sell into North America, or to become a North American player?
For companies weighing their options, distributor relationships, joint ventures, greenfield investment, or acquisition—the answer depends less on company size than on what’s actually scarce. If the barrier is market access, trust, and shelf space, a well-chosen acquisition of a smaller local brand can shortcut years of relationship-building. If the barrier is proximity to customers, regulatory qualification, or “buy local” pressure in sectors like aerospace, defense, or advanced manufacturing, buying an existing local operation can be the only realistic way to compete with domestic suppliers.
The common thread in both the Barilla and Poggipolini deals is that acquisition wasn’t a fallback after exporting stalled, it was a deliberate choice to acquire something North American companies already had and Italian companies didn’t: local trust, local capacity, or both. For Italian SMEs and mid-sized firms evaluating Canada and the United States, that’s the real lesson. The question worth asking isn’t only “how do we sell here?” It’s “what do we actually need to own here to compete?”
