Out in the hills of the Mugello Valley, opposite a sunflower field, La Marzocco’s Scarperia factory sits just off a village road. The factory occupies multiple buildings in the office park, connected by an elevated walkway that overlooks the warehouse bay doors, where raw steel is brought indoors to fabricate panels and boilers for the machines assembled on the floor.
Inside the factory itself, machines are still assembled by hand, just like they have been since 1927. The process starts with an espresso machine frame that is secured to a bench. One by one, integral parts like the boilers, internal tubing, and valves are added. Once all the appropriate parts for that station are secured, the machines are then wheeled over to the next section, where they undergo a full quality inspection.
Assembling machines by hand has two main advantages—the La Marzocco factory artisans can see exactly how each piece fits together for the model they’re working on, and once they’ve assembled that section, each machine undergoes testing before it moves on to the next stage. By the time electronics, group heads, solenoid valves, and computer boards were added, each machine had undergone multiple inspections to guarantee it stood up to the La Marzocco standard.
The production engineer’s offices sit near the last area of production, where the panels are finally added to each espresso machine. While the engineers in R&D upstairs spend their time designing new espresso machine features, like Smart Saturation and straight-in portafilters, the production engineers ensure that each part fits perfectly together. Their job is to plan out the internal structure of every espresso machine so that it can be properly assembled with the least amount of variation possible. Every part of each machine has to be designed to fit exactly where it needs to in order for each espresso machine to leave the factory to perform as highly as it should. Throughout the day, the production engineers check in on the floor to make sure the assemblage is going smoothly and to plan how to make production even more efficient.
Each machine is also tracked in the factory via an RFID chip. As a machine progresses through production, it passes through various gateways that log the serial number, location, and time, ensuring that every machine is easily matched to the outstanding order. Parts are tracked this way, too—as parts pickers rotate through the automated library storage and fill bins for each day’s orders, the bins are all added to a cart to be distributed to various production lines. As the carts pass through RFID gateways, the parts are tracked to ensure every artisan has what they need.
In the next room over from the factory, the welders are hard at work shaping and constructing the boilers. After extensive testing, it was shown that interior welds were superior for attaching group heads to cylindrical boilers, sometimes lasting over 100 times longer than exterior welds. This means that most boilers are hand-welded by skilled craftspeople to ensure the highest quality possible. It’s rare to see a factory where parts are actually cut from raw steel and shaped in-house in 2024, but the commitment to building reliable, consistent, and precise machines is a top priority for La Marzocco.
Making espresso machines by hand requires more labor than an automated factory, but it’s a key element to what makes La Marzocco special. Now that the company produces around 40,000 espresso machines per year, it’s key that production capabilities are buffeted by careful planning, good design, and innovative factory layout. At the same time, each espresso machine that leaves the La Marzocco factory must maintain the same quality and consistency that the company name is known for, and the only way to do that is to handmake every machine in Florence.
