Like other European teenagers in the early 1970s, Lucca Berrone was fascinated by all things American, but he didn’t imagine that he’d later wind up living here and running a successful business.

Berrone is general manager of Sacmi USA in Urbandale. His company is a subsidiary of Sacmi Group, an Italian-based industrial group that manufactures equipment for a variety of industries. He convinced the owners of Sacmi to set up its U.S. headquarters in Iowa in 1994, and now the growing company employs 38 people. On Sept. 30, the Iowa Council for International Understanding will honor Berrone at its annual Passport to Prosperity event as one of three immigrants who have made significant contributions to their community since settling in Iowa.

Berrone came to Des Moines in 1974 as a foreign exchange student from Torino, Italy. He picked Iowa after his older brother’s positive experience in Des Moines as an exchange student. Like his brother, Berrone wanted to experience the football games, celebrations and all the other things an American high school had to offer. During that first year in Iowa, Berrone decided to continue his education in the United States. He enrolled in Iowa State University, where he studied horticulture and international business, with the intention of moving back to Italy after college.

“I visited Iowa State and loved the campus,” Berrone said. “I loved the idea of campus life, and I truly wanted to live and learn in that environment. It was very, very different from anything we had in Italy.”

But Berrone’s career plans took a turn after he met his wife at ISU and learned that the organization he had hoped to work for back in Europe, the Food Agricultural Organization, had moved its headquarters.

After college, he started working in international sales for a small exporting company in Greater Des Moines. Through that job, he worked closely with the Iowa Development Commission, the predecessor to the Iowa Department of Economic Development. He accepted a full-time job as an international trade specialist with the commission, assisting small to mid-sized companies with exporting and trying to attract foreign companies to Iowa. Although he had some success bringing new businesses to Iowa, he wasn’t able to accomplish one thing he had hoped to: bring an Italian manufacturer to Iowa.

“I saw that we had no real strong ties between Iowa and Italian manufacturers,” Berrone said. “I really wanted to bring a company from Italy.”

Berrone left the IDC to work for Midland International Tileworks Inc. in Redfield. At the time, Midlands International was one of only a handful of companies in the United States that did business with Sacmi. As Berrone developed business relationships with representatives from Sacmi, he learned that the Italian equipment manufacturer desperately wanted to grow its business in the United States. They asked for Berrone’s help, and he accepted.

Berrone started working for Sacmi in 1994. He made it clear from the beginning that the company needed to establish a U.S. headquarters, and that the office should be in Greater Des Moines. He convinced the Sacmi owners that this area was an ideal spot for a sales office and warehouse because of its central location and strong workforce.

“I pitched Des Moines as being a location that could actually help our business,” Berrone said. “We found a lot of strength and a lot of pluses of the area: the people we found to work for us, the support system, the good transportation and serviceability of the area. All of these things made it easier to distribute and sell the product.”

He started Sacmi USA with just a couple of employees in a 1,500-square-foot office. In 1998, Sacmi built a 12,000-square-foot headquarters in Urbandale, which it expanded to 85,000 square feet in 2003.

“I asked the company initially to invest in three different things: a sales office in the United States, a warehouse with parts and a machine shop,” Berrone said. “You have to have those things, not just from the customer standpoint of being able to service what we sell, but to demonstrate that we weren’t here for just a few sales, but for the long run.”

The Sacmi Group was established in 1919. Berrone said the company is the leading ceramics equipment manufacturer in the world. It manufactures machines for every stage of the ceramic tile production process, and this part of the business has benefited from the U.S. construction boom in recent years.

“Ceramic tile has become a very entrenched type of product in the building industry in the United States,” Berrone said. “It’s a leading choice now of consumers, and as consumption has skyrocketed, our production of machinery has increased.”

Although ceramics manufacturing equipment is the mainstay of Sacmi’s business, the company also produces equipment used in the packaging, food processing and plastics industries, and it staffs a large research and development team. The company’s worldwide sales total about $2 billion annually. Berrone said the diverse range of products Sacmi produces puts the company in contact with many different industries.

Sacmi now has six locations in North America. The U.S. division’s Urbandale headquarters houses a product showroom, manufacturing space and a warehouse that stocks more than $5 million in spare parts for the products it sells. The equipment the U.S. division sells, such as labeling machines, ceramic tile glazers and injection-molding machines for plastics, are manufactured in Italy.

Several of the company’s Urbandale employees are fluent in Italian. Berrone travels to Italy a few times a year for business, and his office stays in close communication with the parent company each day.

“We have an umbilical cord that is seven hours ahead of us,” he said.

Iowa customers of Sacmi include Wells Dairy Inc. in LeMars, Ball Plastics Corp. in Ames and a plastics molding company called Alpla of Iowa in Iowa City.

Some of Sacmi’s products are attracting attention from unexpected places these days. Sacmi’s electronic nodes, which were created to perform tasks such as detecting the peak of a roasting cycle of coffee beans, were recently ordered by hospitals in New York for research on olfactory testing on cancer cells.

“It’s pretty exciting because you start off developing a product for one specific application and then you find yourself with the potential for a lot of different applications, some you never would have thought of when you began,” Berrone said.