Generations of Gelato 

Celebrating Canada's 150th Birthday with heartwarming stories from our family of suppliers who chose to make Canada home.

By Marina Michaelides

The promise of a job building a military base in Wainwright, brought him to Alberta, but he arrived on a September morning only to find the job gone, the snow falling and no warm clothes. He borrowed money to buy a coat, and a three-month stint in Grande Prairie laying railway tracks got him on his feet, until the winter shut down construction.

On the move again, he landed a job making steel bedsprings for Canadian Bedding (now Sealy) in Edmonton for 75c an hour. He saved everything he could and four years later paid the passage for his two sisters and parents to come over from Italy. At work, Sal’s skills with his hands quickly earned him a rise through the ranks, eventually landing the company a contract for fifty thousand top quality office chairs. “We made them so well,” he smiles proudly, “I still see them around the city, half a century later!”

	Quality, for Sal is everything. Which is why it took him so long to get married. Not until he was thirty-eight. Sal met his wife Concetta, who was visiting her brother from Italy, in 1968. Their son Tom was born in 1970.
	Young Salvatore at school in Italy, fifth from the left.

Knowing his limited written English meant a management position at the bedding company wasn’t going to happen, Sal left his job of seventeen years to set up a gelato store with Concetta and her brother Berto Bertuccio. Who would do that in 1981, in the middle of a recession, with interest rates on business loans at 15-20% in a city where people didn’t even know what gelato was? “You gotta be a little crazy in business, to take the risks,” Sal smiles.

	Forever on a quest for quality, they sent Berto to a gelato trade fair in Rimini, Italy. He came back with a winning recipe from the world-reknowned maestro himself, Luca Caviezel. What an investment that research turned out to be.  There were queues outside the door from day one when the Pinocchio gelato scoop-shop opened in the West End’s Primrose Mall.
Salvatore & Berto outside Mama Teresa restaurant where they started making gelato 1982

Talk about ahead of its time! Maybe it was the 32 flavours, the quality of Alberta milk or the commitment to local berries and ingredients. People were soon driving from Spruce Grove for a destination Sunday jaunt. “A lady with a Rolls Royce used to bring her dog for a scoop,” Sal remembers fondly.

Newspaper clippings circa 1987.	Salvatore & Concetta Ursino 1987	Salvatore filling litre tubs 1985

Soon they were all working seventeen hours a day. By 1982 Pinocchio was selling nineteen thousand 95c cones a month, forcing another move to a new factory/store on 124^th St. and 109 Avenue.

Son Tom grew up amongst the pails of hand-strained raspberries and shelled pistachios. He worked full-time one summer, aged seventeen, “Because I wanted to buy my first fly-fishing rod,” and soon realized “Having an ice-cream shop was also a really great way to make friends!” At twenty Tom had listened enough to his dad to be able to run the production process. At twenty-six he applied his NAIT marketing course into creating a wholesale and delivery division selling to restaurants and cafes.

Tom & Salvatore Ursino winning Alberta's Best Ice Cream award, 1990

Great timing, because Italian Centre Shop founder Frank Spinelli asked Sal to make litre tubs for sale in his grocery store in 1987. The two men were great friends, with a shared passion for building the Italian community in Edmonton, and particularly the Ital Canadians soccer team, for which Sal was the Treasurer, Frank the founder.

Back to gelato. New machinery from Italy and the move to the current factory at 12814 163 St. soon meant a boost in production from one 160 litres/hour to 400. This gave Tom and Sal time to indulge in new recipes and flavours, inspired by collaborations with restaurateurs and chefs. Goat’s Milk Sorbet and Captain Crunch Cereal have been big hits. Tom’s latest craze is local craft-beer gelato and spirits from local distilleries. The commitment to local, like the original gelato recipe, has not changed. Natural ingredients only will do; cream, sugar (much, much lower than most brands), skimmed milk powder, egg yolks (that’s what makes it gelato, not ice-cream) and plant-based stabilizers.

Tom & 77 year old Salvatore circa 2008

What also sets Pinocchio gelato above the rest is a very low air content–at about only 30%, compared to many as high as 130% air: actual ingredients. Pinocchio guarantees a thick, velvety, creamy lick every time.

Tom’s got big plans to make his dad even more proud and continue the family legacy. The re-designed packaging has been a great success. He’s looking around for the perfect individual sized gelato tub, which will open up many new markets. “A big part of my job is also predicting taste trends, which change every year,” Tom explains. “That’s why I just came back from the trade fair in Rimini, the same one my uncle went to when he brought back our original gelato recipe, more than thirty years ago.”

“My dad taught me to takes risks,” smiles Tom, “So within a year, I’m mortgaging the house to pay for the new packaging and machinery that’ll boost capacity seven and a half times the volume we do now.”

That’s about ten thousand litres of gelato a day, opening up new markets across Alberta and Canada.

“He’ll do it,” Sal pronounces, looking up from sticking labels on the litre tubs in the work-room covered with photos of Tom as a baby, a young man, a teenager. Maybe the real reason Sal, quite frail now, is still working at 87 is so he can still spend time with his son. Maybe the secret ingredient that makes Pinocchio ice-cream so special is the love this father and son team share for each other, and the labour of love they make together.