3 Michelin Star Chef Niko Romito Partners With A Pharmacy And Nutritionist To Create A Genius Food Pharmacy

Elena and Marco Cecchini, brother and sister, and owners of a pharmacy for years dealt with clients trying to optimize their health. In Italy, the relationship between pharmacist and client is close—playing a key role in helping and preventing ailments. In a country where healthcare is a public institution, prevention is a big part of health management. In the micro, it helps the individual maintain good health but in the macro, prevention and health maintenance can cut down costs on the public health care system. It got them thinking about more ways to enhance and support people’s health. 

“Farmacia Alimentare (Food Pharmacy), above all, is a change, it gives a sense of freedom. Before this project, I had always seen food as a privation. With this project, food became an opportunity,” said Elena Cecchini, co-CEO of Farmacia Alimentare.

“The idea of the Farmacia Alimentare, arises from an awareness that many of our patients rely on pharmacological treatments for various pathologies that often can be helped and supported by a healthy lifestyle that includes adequate dietary advice,” says Marco Cecchini, co-CEO of Farmacia Alimentare. The pharmacy the Cecchini Family has run for the past four years remains operative in Aprilia, just 20 miles from Rome. There, they continue to sell pharmaceuticals that are still necessary, but now with the Farmacia Alimentare, clients that are both healthy and with pathologies can eat food created by Chef Niko Romito, studied with Nutritionist Ferdinando A. Giannone.

Elena and Marco wanted to offer gastronomic products that would embrace the entire community not only for people who have been diagnosed with a pathology. Elena wanted to find a chef and a nutritionist who would be able to help create and execute a menu to solve these problems.

Niko Romito is a Three Michelin Star Chef and entrepreneur who has an uncanny ability to create delicious food that also aims to solve bigger social issues. In 2016, he partnered with the University of Rome La Sapienza and the Giomi/Gioservice Group to launch Nutritional Intelligence. It was there that Romito redesigned the whole production chain of hospital catering through the application of cooking techniques using technology that standardized dishes and optimized ingredients creating consistency in the food served and lowering costs for the hospital. He improved the organoleptic qualities of the meals served to patients who were often recovering or living with pathologies. Romito put an emphasis on the post-transformation nutritional value of the raw ingredients—and he had a tight budget, 5 Euro a day, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner per patient—and he succeeded. 

“I’m always more convinced that beyond my projects, awareness must be raised by institutions and young chefs to re-write the restoration model. So if you think of hospitals, but also healthy people, young people, school cafeterias where you often don’t eat well, we are continuing to understand the importance of a nutritional diet. Also in regards to the public spending of a nation,” says Romito. Investing in the health of people, especially preventatively with good nutrition that is exquisitely delicious, teaches the importance of ingredients, and is accessible to everyone was paramount in the creation of this project. 

Romito’s background has been in creating and executing dishes at the highest level but he has also garnered experience in the health space making him a perfect fit to take part in this project.

“The Farmacia Alimentare is very much a project that responds to those values that I really like and that I have been trying to carry forward for years. This is a very important issue, and we are increasingly becoming more aware, at the global level, that food and food processing will be a strategic asset to solve a series of health and environmental problems and fundamental for a good quality of life,” says Romito.

Accessibility and the democratization of high-quality food is another tenant important to Romito. Before deciding to begin a career as a chef, he studied economics. The imprint of his economic studies is clear in this project but also in others. Romito decided that with reopening his 3 Michelin Star restaurant in Castel di Sangro, Il Reale, he will offer a 15-course meal for 150 Euro. With a simple division calculation, that’s 10 Euro per dish, “less than a hamburger in a pub,” says Romito. 

The Farmacia Alimentare also drives to be accessible—for everybody. Making these gastronomic experiences accessible to afford even on a daily basis creates the capacity to include more people. “From an entrepreneurial point of view, we have to find the balance between inclusivity and capacity to maintain high standards at that price. A project of this level has all the right factors to allow for more people to be included. In an economy of scale of large numbers, there must be positive results, otherwise, the projects are beautiful but if they do not have the economic strength to go forward, it is difficult to scale them,” says Romito. 

Months of work went into creating a series of dishes from the maritozzo con la crema, a Roman breakfast pastry that is traditionally a sweet brioche bun filled with whipped cream. At Farmacia Alimentare, nutritionist Ferdinando A. Giannone studied what ingredients would be optimal to use to allow the maritozzo to be a healthier option using strictly the highest quality products. He indicated the better version of the ingredients and combinations of fats, legumes, vegetables, and even some animal proteins. Romito and his army of students worked to execute revising dishes in his culinary Academy in Castel di Sangro, marrying taste and nutrition. 

Instead of using egg and or other saturated fat sources, this brioche pastry is made with water as the dough base. The cream that fills the maritozzo is made with nuts, chocolate and water. “We wanted to create food that could be eaten every day, with no guilt,” says Giannone.

Some may read this worrying that this means the traditions of Italy may become taboo. That isn’t Farmacia Alimentare’s goal. “We believe that moments of celebration must be special occasions. Tortellini must remain tortellini, panettone remains panettone. But at the same time, what we are doing is creating dishes that can be eaten daily. Maybe balancing sugars which exemplifies to people that we don’t have to remove all sugar, but we can learn to balance them,” says Giannone.

In 2013, the Mediterranean diet was included on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. A diet that is representative of culture, tied to unique skills, knowledge, ritual and tradition concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, conservation and cooking, a cultural symbol of pride for the Italian people. This project is not to erase that tradition, but it is to give a daily option to people using the plethora of rich seasonal ingredients that are unique to the Mediterranean.

“Our objective is to create a new 2.0 Mediterranean diet. The word diet derives from Greek meaning lifestyle—a way of living, the culture of food. The word diet is not a synonym for deprivation. It’s not meant to deprive or starve or eliminate. That’s not what diet means. Diet really means lifestyle. The diet and lifestyle of the Mediterranean must be revalued,” said Giannone.

Yet, the tradition of the real Mediterranean diet has not been consumed the way it was meant to be in recent years even in Italy. According to the WHO, Italy has among the highest percentage of obese children in the EU, with 20.4% of children being overweight, 9.4% considered obese, and 2.4% severely obese.

When you speak with older Italian locals, they often cite that the gastronomic change is due to the shift in lifestyle. That many people now live in cities and have moved further away from living off the land and cultivating their own food as was once commonly done in Italy. Whatever the reason, the Farmacia Alimentare serves as a solution to meet the new needs of Italians.

“I fell in love with this project from the beginning—it is an ambitious project, completely innovative, and completely revolutionary,” says Giannone.