Alfred Lepore

Alfred Lepore broke new ground for imported Italian foods in the United States and fostered American production of Italian products under the iconic Ferrara brand. It all began with a 19th century cafe in New York’s Little Italy frequented by opera stars like Enrico Caruso.

Foray into Food. “I was born into Italian food products since my great uncle, Antonio Ferrara, opened Ferrara in 1892,” says Lepore, who became president of the family business in 1966. “He was an opera impresario and it was more of a local hangout for opera singers,” he adds.

Antonio died in the 1930s and Lepore’s father inherited the pastry shop and expanded production. “The boom came in the ’40s. My dad made nougat candy, torrone, under contract with the armed forces during World War II so we were fortunate in that we had sugar available to us,” Lepore recalls. At 12, he began working in the cafe as a dishwasher and continued to learn different aspects of the business during school vacations. After graduating from Villanova University, he studied law.

“I found it very boring, very slow,” he says. He left law school, returned to work at Ferrara and “never looked back.”

Breaking Boundaries. Soon after joining Ferrara in the early 1960s, Lepore got involved in the Specialty Food Association to promote some of the Italian products his company made. “Specialty food was in its infancy and I don’t think there were 20 members at the time,” he says. “I started pushing forward. Little by little it grew and took off.”

He stuck with tradition rather than innovating and began to import Italian panettone, tomato sauce, breadsticks, and espresso. “At that time the only Italian product you could find outside of an Italian neighborhood was pasta,” he notes.

Industry Impact. In addition to growing the Ferrara name into a globally known brand, Lepore wrote Ferrara’s Little Italian Cookbook in 1968 and served as the board chair for the Specialty Food Association from 1980 to 1982. He denies being any kind of visionary, describing himself as “just fortunate.”

“We helped people back in Italy by bringing their foods to a huge audience in the U.S.,” Lepore says. “I’m very delighted, very proud.”