150 not out: Fiocchi on cartridges, competition and the road beyond lead

Fiocchi is 150 this year, and for a cartridge company that figure carries real weight. Founded in Lecco in 1876, the firm has outlasted wars, recessions and pandemics, and it is marking the milestone with a year-long programme of events under the title Legacy in Motion. For the clay and game shooter, the anniversary is a useful moment to take stock of a brand whose cartridges have been a fixture on British shooting grounds for years – and to ask where it goes from here.

The honest answer, from a product point of view, is that the company has chosen consolidation over fireworks. “There’s not been a new cartridge brought out for the 150-year anniversary,” says Hannah Gibson, commercial business manager at Fiocchi UK, in an exclusive interview. Instead, the focus has been on tightening the range. “We’ve actually been streamlining SKUs in preparation for the steel transition,” she explains, concentrating on core products and customers’ favourites rather than chasing novelty, a restrained and deliberate choice.

Fiocchi has form for marking its milestones with special cartridges – it produced a commemorative round and presentation box for its 140th anniversary, which Hannah, who was with the company at the time, remembers fondly – so the absence of a 150th edition is telling. The energy that might have gone into a limited run has instead been directed at the non-lead problem and at the loads the company introduced shortly before the anniversary, which broadened its competition and game offering. With a hard regulatory deadline approaching, a tidy, focused range that customers understand is worth more than a commemorative novelty.

A range that runs from first cartridge to Olympic final

Where Fiocchi does want to be understood is on breadth. Hannah describes a range that is deliberately built to carry a shooter through an entire career, from an entry-level cartridge bought for a first lesson all the way up to the loads used at the very top of the sport. “It’s a brand for everyone,” she says. “You’ve got people starting off on our entry-level product, but then you’ve got the Olympic competition cartridges.”

That competition pedigree is something the company leans on. Fiocchi cartridges have been used to win at the highest level, including Olympic gold, and Hannah’s point is that an aspiring clay shot can buy into the same name that has taken others to the podium. The UK operation also sits within a three-brand stable – Fiocchi alongside the British marque Lyalvale Express and the premium Italian house Baschieri & Pellagri – which between them span price points from the everyday to the super-premium. A shooter, or a shooting ground, can pick the cartridge to suit the day and the budget without leaving the group.

The company’s approach to the people who represent it is equally distinctive. Hannah, who shot for Fiocchi for the best part of a decade before joining the firm, says the priority has always been character over silverware. “It’s more important that they believe in the product rather than the results,” she says. The win, in her telling, belongs to the shooter; the brand is simply along for the journey. “We can give them the ammunition. We can’t give them the motivation when it’s chucking it down with rain and you’ve got to get out and practise.”

It is a deliberately low-pressure approach. Rather than just chasing the handful of shooters who win consistently at the very top, Fiocchi also looks for likeable people who are good at telling a story and genuinely enjoy their shooting, on the view that authenticity travels further with ordinary club and ground shooters than a trophy cabinet does. For a clay shot choosing a cartridge, it is a refreshingly unflashy pitch from a brand that has Olympic pedigree to boast about and chooses not to lead with it.

Confidence, not just compliance

No conversation about shotgun ammunition in Britain gets far without the move away from lead, and Fiocchi’s team is, by its own admission, almost talked out on the subject. Readers will need no reminding of where the regulations land; the company’s energy is spent elsewhere – on a conviction that the biggest obstacle to the transition is not the chemistry but the confidence of the shooter. “There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation out there,” the company says, and the work now is to prove that “just because we’re changing the fuel that’s in the gun, it’s not going to stop you doing the sport that you love.”

That is where the firm’s component manufacturing comes in. Because Fiocchi makes its own powders, primers and shells from raw material to finished cartridge, it can adjust burn rates and pressures in ways that brands buying in their components cannot. The company says it has done “a tremendous amount of research” into steel and other non-toxic loads, that some of the results have genuinely surprised it, and that the products are not all on the shelves yet simply because demand has not caught up with the deadline.

The strategy for closing that gap is straightforward: put the cartridges in people’s hands and let them see for themselves. Fiocchi says it has been doing exactly that for the past two or three years, building familiarity ahead of 2029 rather than waiting for the cliff edge. There is even a glass-half-full reading of the upheaval. “None of us wanted to go down that road,” the company concedes, but with every manufacturer in the same boat and the rest of Europe expected to follow, the next few years will bring “loads of new products” for shooters to try.

Made closer to the British shooter

One reason Fiocchi believes it can deliver loads suited to British clay and game is that it makes them here. The company established a UK presence in 2007, judging the British market loyal and strong enough to warrant manufacturing close to the shooter rather than shipping everything in, and that platform was reinforced in 2022 when the group acquired Lyalvale Express, the long-established British cartridge maker based in Staffordshire. The thinking is rooted in how shooters actually buy: nobody orders cartridges six months ahead, they want them for the weekend, and a domestic factory means loads can be tuned to British conditions and delivered at British speed. It also means the firm can react quickly as the non-lead range develops, rather than waiting on stock from abroad.

A milestone marked by people

If the range has stayed deliberately quiet for the anniversary, the celebrations have not. Fiocchi has chosen to mark 150 years by bringing the industry together – events in the UK, Germany, Italy and the United States, gatherings that have included competitors and suppliers as well as customers – on the principle that the sector is one close-knit community. There is also a handsome history of the company, produced as a book, for those who want to understand how a family firm from Lecco became a fixture of British shooting.

For the clay or game shooter, the takeaway is reassuringly practical. The brand that has been in your cartridge bag for years is not going anywhere, it is putting its 150 years of component know-how into the loads that will replace lead, and it would rather you tried them now than worried about them later.