With an Italian feeling of life: how METRO Chef pasta is made

‘Pasta is much more than just a dish that we serve – to me, it’s all about my homeland, our tradition, a feeling of life,’ says Teresa Pagani with enthusiasm. Teresa is the co-owner and sales manager of the pasta manufacturer Valdigrano. Her grandfather founded a pasta factory called Pasta Pagani in the Northern Italian town of Rovato after the Second World War. Pasta Pagani was eventually sold by the family. A few years later, in 1997, Teresa’s father, Flavio, started a new family business, Valdigrano, in the same town with a production capacity of 16,000 tonnes per year. Flavio remains the company’s CEO. Today Valdigrano’s five production lines turn out around 100,000 tonnes of semolina, wholegrain and organic pasta annually – from long spaghetti to short penne noodles to special forms like ruote wagon wheels and star-shaped stelline. The entire Pagani family is involved at Valdigrano: in addition to Teresa and her father, her brothers Giuseppe and Paolo serve as CFO and CTO, respectively, and her sister Anna is quality director.

Double step to al dente

Valdigrano covers the full range of Italian pasta varieties. But functionality plays an important role as well. ‘We’ve developed a production line that’s specially tailored to the needs of restaurants, hotels and caterers,’ Teresa says. Valdigrano employs a sophisticated production process and the highest quality standards in making the pasta. What sets their product apart is its suitability for double cooking. Chefs can pre-cook the pasta and then only need to briefly heat it up later – and it maintains its form and comes out with the desired al dente consistency. ‘To prevent the pasta from breaking down in the second stage of the cooking process, we exclusively use semolina that fulfils our tough quality standards,’ Teresa emphasises. And there is high demand from professional chefs; pasta for the HoReCa segment currently makes up 50 per cent of the company’s production.

Semolina – small grains of hard durum wheat – is the basic ingredient of Valdigrano pasta. After the summer harvest, the wheat is ground, loaded into large tanks and transported to the 22,000-square-metre pasta factory, where it is first examined by Valdigrano employees. ‘Before we unload the semolina, we inspect it with a special machine to make sure its protein and gluten content, and also its grain size, meet our quality standard,’ says Teresa. If the semolina passes the test, it is transferred to one of the 16 storage silos on the factory grounds in Rovato.

Shaping the semolina

From the silos, the semolina is fed into the production process in the adjacent pasta factory. A mixture of 70 per cent semolina and 30 per cent water is blended into dough in a mixer. Once it has attained a smooth consistency, it goes to the extruder, the nozzles of which shape the dough under high pressure. The just-formed, freshly pressed soft pasta is then dried in special drying machines at up to 90 degrees Celsius. Short noodles like farfalle have a shorter drying time of about 4.5 hours, while the drying process for longer varieties like tagliatelle can take up to 6 hours. ‘This ensures that the pasta retains its full flavour and has a shelf life of up to 36 months,’ Teresa explains. Cold air then cools the dry pasta down to storage temperature, readying it for packaging.

Valdigrano uses 18 machines to ensure that each pasta variety ends up in the proper packaging – from small 500-gram packets to large 5-kilo bags. ‘Special robots put the packaged pasta into cartons and then the cartons onto pallets,’ says Teresa in describing the process. Finally, the pallets are loaded onto lorries, which transport the pasta to 20 METRO and MAKRO countries, including Germany, France, Austria, Romania and Ukraine.

Since its founding, Valdigrano has raised its production capacity by more than a factor of five. This also means an increased workforce: having started with 25 workers, the company now employs 140 in shifts running round the clock. An important milestone was the repurchase in 2023 of the historic Pasta Pagani noodle factory, also located in Rovato – the very place where the tradition of the Pagani family enterprise began. ‘That was a really special moment for us,’ says Teresa. ‘Our company story is far from over, and we look forward to continuing to bring our Italian pasta to the world.’