About Us

I'll tell you a story. . .

First of all, there was the neighborhood

There is an image that has never completely vanished in Campania: a shutter that rises before the road wakes up, a counter consumed by use, someone who calls you from behind that counter by name.
For generations, shopping has been like this. In the Neapolitan hinterland and throughout the region, the shop near the house was not a makeshift: it was the place where you entered even just to say hello, where the clerk knew what you were looking for before I said it, where courtesy was not a sales technique but a way of being in the world. We got out of there with the feeling of having been at home.
On that fabric of small shops there was a profession as old as trade: that of the agent. Men and women who got into the car every morning with a price list and an order block, and who shop after shop, year after year, built the presence of the big Italian brands on a territory that no company, alone, could ever reach.
None of them, then, imagined that work was about to be questioned.

The crack

Then something slowly began to crack.
For large companies, reaching one by one thousands of small stores had become a luxury. The accounts of microdistribution never returned: too many kilometers, too many minute deliveries, too many costs to serve customers who individually weighed little, but which together were worth a lot.
Thus began the race to look for organized distributors to entrust the territory, to reduce the logistical costs and those of the sales network.
For the agents it was the beginning of an uncertain era.
The mandates became fragile, revocable, provisional.
Over the years many saw a registered letter arrive and in that envelope, in a few lines, the work of a lifetime ended: the customers built shop by shop, the relationships cultivated for years, the presence of a brand on a territory that did not exist before them. Everything remained there, intact - but they were no longer part of it.
Meanwhile, large-scale distribution was also advancing in Campania, taking market shares one after the other. Yet the small independent shops and supermarkets, those without a sign, continued to resist. The Campania consumer had not stopped choosing proximity, the face known, the shop of all time.
The market resisted. It was no longer protected who served him.

The dream

It was from that awareness that an idea was born. Indeed, even before being an idea, it was a dream.
At the end of 2012 a group of agents - people who grew up in the food sector, with years spent alongside the best Italian companies, Barilla among others - asked themselves a simple and uncomfortable question: if our job is about to disappear, can we resign ourselves and watch it vanish into thin air?
The answer was no.
And the idea that came out of it had only one principle, but sculpted: to safeguard the work and give a solid future to the efforts made.
Not founding a company to sell more, founding it so that no agent should ever see years of fatigue deleted from a letter. For the territory to continue to be served, shop by shop, even when large companies could no longer do so. Because that network of shops and small supermarkets - which the shareholders were convinced would have resisted for at least two decades - would find someone willing to believe it.
It was a dream made by people awake at five in the morning. The type of dream that is measured in kilometers.

2013: the first step

A dream, to become something, needs someone to give up something, struggle and suffer to achieve the goal.
"Open an umbrella before the rain starts to fall" It was one of the members who did so: leaving Barilla, a name and a security, to accept a mandate as an agent with a deposit on behalf of Divella S.p.A. It wasn't a step forward on anyone's ladder. It was a leap.
Did the idea of the service that a network of agents could offer changed, how to restore the value that the agents had lost to companies? Offer the latter not only a sale but to replace the distribution chain by combining sales and delivery service all managed from a single starting point, that place we had intended to call D&D.
Thus was born in 2013 D&D associated: two initials, a surname is a company a starting point.
Today that name tells a very different company from what it was, and its core business has changed over time.
But the name has remained, and will remain. Not out of nostalgia: so that nothing is forgotten. Because those who enter D&D today know that it all started with a renunciation and a risk, and not from an industrial plan.
Three years later, D&D revokes the mandate with Divella and opens the way for collaborations with many other companies in the sector. The distribution history had really begun.

The anxiety of the day after

The first years were what they always are, when they start from scratch: hard work, poor earnings, some victory and several defeats.
But the partners were not hungry for money. They were hungry for another thing. They wanted to build a network of specialist agents in the industry, and they wanted those agents to finally have someone who believed in them — someone who put solid protection to their future.
There is a concern that every agent knows and that none of them ever tells anyone.
We called her The anxiety of the day after. It is not the fear of not knowing how to sell anymore: it is the fear that someone, at a certain point, will prevent you from doing so. It is knowing that everything you build remains in the hands of those who gave you the mandate, and that gratitude is not a budget item.
The D&D went to look for those agents. those who wanted to redeem their efforts. Those who no longer wanted to have dinner with that anxiety sitting at the table.
And he made them a promise, which has remained the same until today:
your every effort will produce a future income that no one will ever be able to take away from you.
In the meetings there was no talk of budget. This was told. And it was, for every agent in the room, exactly the dream he had always had: working for a company that would never betray him.
Thus it was that people began to believe in their work again.

Today

More than thirteen years have passed. Years of constant work, at a high pace, without shortcuts.
Today, in 2026, that dream has an address, of the warehouses, of the vans that leave in the morning. has more than 40 agents and 60 collaborators, professionals who every day, together with the network, keep this project alive.
Those who had left to defend a profession found themselves having built a new one.

Heart of expense: for the dream to continue

The two decades that the partners had given to the proximity shops are about to come to an end. We know, and we don't pretend we don't know.
A dream, to stay alive, must know how to transform before being forced to do so.
In 2024, the project that ferries D&D into the future was born: affiliation. And it was born with a name that carries within everything we have learned in thirteen years of shops, counters and customers.

heart of expense

It is a project built on the needs of today's consumer, but based on three foundations that come from traditions. Three things that make the difference in a store, and that in large-scale distribution are too often lost in the race on the sidelines.
cleaning. The store must be clean and tidy with the same attention that our mothers put into our homes.
courtesy. Education, respect for the customer, this is the soul of the shop, not an accessory.
Price. a fair and affordable price, especially on quality products, because the expense is
* a right of all and not a privilege for the few*
We believe that these are the right ingredients because shopping is once again a pleasant experience, and not just a matter to hurry.

And tomorrow

All this began as certain things begin: with someone who, in front of a profession that was disappearing, refused to stand by and watch.
We dreamed of a company that did not betray the people who make it.
It took longer than we thought, and it went better than we dared to hope.
The dream, for now, continues.