The site is located in Parma, in northern Italy. © Google
Italian pasta group Barilla will undertake incremental investment totalling €50 million in its pasta factory in Italy.
The site in Parma, in the north of the country, is the world’s largest production plant for dry pasta with a projected output of 350,000 tonnes of pasta this year.
It will benefit from enlarged warehousing space and investments in the plant’s efficiency, with an initial injection of €32 million expected to be approved next month.
“The company is due to approve the first €32 million investment for the pasta plant in July,” Alessandro Spadini, the factory’s director, confirmed in conversation with journalists.
The investment is on top of another €50 million that Barilla previously spent on upgrades to a separate factory in Rubbiano di Solignano, 16 miles southwest of Parma, which is used to produce pasta sauces.
The factories are part of a 30-strong network of production sites operated by Barilla around the world. 14 of them are in Italy, and three of them outside Europe.
That has caused problems with Italy’s proposed mark of origin scheme, which was intended to promote Italian-made products overseas but which, in recent weeks, has been hit by controversy and division with producers failing to agree a consensus on who should be allowed to join.
Barilla wanted to use the Made in Italy mark across all of its products worldwide, indicating that they were manufactured to traditional Italian standards.
But small-scale producers have fought back against the plan, arguing that the scheme should be used to promote products that use exclusively Italian ingredients.
That has cast doubt on the future of the mark, as FoodBev reported last month.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024