SD Calabria's existing customer base was largely Italian expats already seeking out Calabrian specialities.
Temu connected the business to a broader European audience discovering the products for the first time.
Founder Antonino Quaranta credits the platform with expanding his reach beyond Italian expats to European buyers with no Italian roots.
SD Calabria is a family-run artisan food business based in the province of Vibo Valentia, in the toe of Italy's boot. Founded by Antonino Quaranta and his wife, it specialises in handcrafted Calabrian cured meats and cheeses — nduja, soppressata, salsiccia, and the aged cheeses of Monteporo — sourced directly from small local producers and sold online across Europe.
For most of its life, the business sold to people who already knew what they were looking for. Its 12,000-strong customer base was built largely on Italian expats across France, Belgium and Germany. These buyers were searching for a taste of home.
Joining Temu's local seller programme in mid-2024 cast SD Calabria's net much wider. The platform began surfacing SD Calabria's products to European shoppers browsing cured meats or artisan cheeses. These people were not searching for nduja, some hadn't even heard of it. "Joining Temu changed everything," says Quaranta. "Now I see Spanish customer names, German surnames, buyers from the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, Ireland, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. Before, I only saw Italian names."
Temu's local seller programme operates across 37 markets and targets 80 percent of European sales coming from local sellers by lowering the barriers that have made cross-border e-commerce difficult for small businesses to scale.
The products are rooted in a specific place. San Calogero, Quaranta's hometown, has a generations-old reputation for pork craftsmanship. He selects every producer personally, visits curing facilities, and tastes everything before listing it. "When you cut into an artisanal product, you smell aromas that simply don't exist in a mass-produced item," he says. Quaranta spent 14 years as a financial adviser before leaving to build something connected to the food traditions he grew up with.
With no sign-up fee and no advertising spend required, the platform's existing audience does the discovery work. "Temu is a great shopfront, with an already very engaged customer base," Quaranta says.
The business now plans to grow from 27 active listings to Quaranta's broader catalogue of 300 products, adding Calabrian tuna, anchovy fillets and regional soft drinks. "Temu gives an explosive boost to growth," says Quaranta. "If I have a stable base of monthly orders, I can build the structure to fulfil 5,000, 6,000, 10,000. The potential is there."