From the Huffington Post article (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-conversation-about-wheel-sharing-with-salvatore-palella_us_58e1aec7e4b0d804fbbb7472) written by a Helbiz Employee:
This is not Salvatore’s first foray into entrepreneurship. In his teens he started a vending machine company called Witamine. The company was in his home country of Italy. It served fresh squeezed orange juice. It grew to be successful in a short period of time. He started manning a few vending machines himself. Within a few years he had hundreds of them around the country. He grew the company till he sold it a few years later. Salvatore does not come from a wealthy family. All the success of Witamine was through opportunities he created for himself. By the time he was 21 years old he had a thousand employees.
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If you research “Witamine” you can find the truth — this was his father’s company, his family is quite wealthy, and nothing about being a “self-made man” is true.
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From a website archive in Italian:
THE PALELLA GROUP — The Witamine Vending project is a development branch of the company Palella Srl which, starting in 1987 from Sicily with twenty years experience in the citrus fruit sector, in 2002 created a branch in Cesena; a choice dictated by the strategic position and the vocation of the Romagna territory as a national district of well-being and quality of life.
The support offered to IRCCs IRST — explains the Managing Director of Palella Srl, Giuseppe Palella — fits naturally with what is the philosophy of Witamine Vending: combining business with wellness, health and healthy feeding of people.