ITALY Quick and easy to cook, Italy’s most famous dish has an appeal that is growing worldwide
Family firms find pasta gives vista of future success

The world’s largest manufacturer of pasta, Italy’s Barilla, sells its products in more than 100 countries and is looking to expand even further.
The company was founded in 1877 as a bread and pasta shop in the northern Italian town of Parma. Today, Barilla’s sales worldwide are worth more than $2 billion a year and over a third comes from exports.
The firm remains in family hands. Three fourth-generation brothers – Guido, Luca and Paolo – own 85 per cent of the company, which is the brand leader for pasta, sauces and baked products in Italy.

It is also the top name for pasta in the US, the second-largest consumer of pasta after Italy. Now on the acquisition trail, its latest deal, agreed at the end of last year, bought Barilla, a pasta business in Mexico, from US food giant Kraft Foods.
Barilla is by no means the only Italian company of modest origins to have made its mark in overseas markets for pasta products. Tucked away in the far southeast of the country is Rutigliano, home of Divella, a family company that has been producing pasta for almost a century and now exports about a fifth of its output.

‘Consumption is steadily increasing’ Francesco Divella

While it has not attained the status of a global giant such as Barilla, Divella has come a long way since it was founded in 1890. It now has a 6.5 per cent share of the Italian market and is constantly on the search for new export outlets.
The company’s president Francesco Divella, whose grandfather founded the firm, has embarked on what he calls a “personal crusade” to develop export markets. “While the consumption of pasta is quite stable in Italy, it is steadily increasing in other countries,” he says. “I calculate that during the last four years alone about 35 new markets for our pasta and cuisine have emerged. The South American countries have been freed from the protectionism of the past, as have the East European countries, and there are also the countries of southeast Asia.”

The pasta company even has a distribution company in Australia. In fact, the only continent where Mr Divella harbours any doubts about his chances of breaking into the market in the near future is Africa, where the diet is dominated by potatoes, rice and staple foods other than pasta. Africa, it seems, may have to wait a while before Italian pasta is able to make its mark. As Italian cuisine becomes ever more famous and highly regarded around the world, Mr Divella hopes to encourage people in other countries to eat more pasta in their homes as well as in restaurants. Pasta, he points out, is quick and easy to cook, and a natural food that is good for you. “In 10 minutes you can have a nice pasta dish without using anything frozen and avoiding the microwave oven,” he adds.

Mr Divella argues that Italian food should become part and parcel of wider efforts
to promote the Italian way of life, along with Italian home design and fashion, which are already in demand across the globe. People all around the world now know that Italian clothes and furniture are distinguished by their colourful, wide variety, the high quality of the materials used in their manufacture and their fine finish. But there’s less awareness, as yet, that much the same applies to Italian pasta.

Divella produces no less than 140 different kinds, each suited to particular sauces and recipes, which helps to ensure that people who eat a lot of pasta will never get bored with it. The company puts a high priority on maintaining its high quality ingredients. It even goes to the length of importing some wheat from Arizona as blending it into the mix helps to produce pasta with high resistance to over-cooking.
“As my grandfather used to say, pasta products have to be made from a mixture, just like good coffee,” adds Mr Divella.