Reinventing Pasta

When Barilla cast a broad look at the entire U.S. marketplace to determine which consumer demographics to target for a new line of “reinvented” pasta, it scanned the expanse, then looked downward—and saw children. That’s because the largest consumer group purchasing the classic blue box of Barilla pasta at retail was parents.

“People who really cook at home tend to be families with small kids,” says Kamal Dagher, former vice president of research and development, Barilla America, Inc., Bannockburn, IL, and now a consultant to the company. “Kids eat pasta, and pasta is cheap and easy to prepare. So they eat pasta very frequently.”

Dagher should know. He was chiefly responsible for bringing the new Barilla line to market and spent countless hours in people’s homes during dinner prep, accompanying them to the supermarket, and asking questions about their pasta choices. He also personally queried some of the country’s top nutritionists and dietitians on what they would consider “credible” in a new, health-promoting pasta.

At retail, gold boxes of Barilla PLUS in six shapes (spaghetti and thin spaghetti, angel hair, penne, rotini, and elbows) perch on shelves next to their blue-box cousins. The pasta is also available to foodservice outlets.

Chris Gatto, vice president of food and beverage, Uno Chicago Grill, Boston, introduced Barilla PLUS to the chain’s menu in 2005 during an extensive menu overhaul. The first summer of the new menu, pennepasta salad was dressed with spinach, tomato and a light dressing, and sold well as a special. Today, Barilla PLUS penne is the foundation of a Tuscany-inspired regular menu item featuring roasted vegetables sautéed in olive oil and tossed with sun-dried tomato sauce, offered both as a vegetarian option and with diced chicken. While the menu makes no health claims, Barilla PLUS and its trademark are included in the menu description.

“We focus on nutrition as part of our offerings,” Gatto says. “We’ll make it as nutritious as possible without affecting taste. We looked at a lot of pastas over the years, and the great thing about Barilla PLUS is that it’s nutritious and tastes great.” Uno is now introducing Barilla PLUS penne with marinara to its children’s menu following positive taste tests with kids.

PASTA TRUTHS 

Not all pastas are created equal, just as no single profile identifies all consumers. Some consumers are “belly fillers,” Dagher says, and make food choices based primarily on cost. Some select foods based on the quality of cooked product or added health benefits, with cost a secondary issue. Still, whether cheap or premium, traditional or fortified, pasta starts with durum wheat.

“The best-quality durum wheat does not come from the best weather; it comes from either very arid or very cold geography,” Dagher says. “In those extremes, the plant produces a seed that focuses more on what’s needed for the next generation, which in those conditions involves less starch and higher protein.” Higher-quality durum wheat from Arizona, for instance, is scrawnier and more golden than durum from Kansas, thanks to Arizona wheat’s greater ratio of protein to starch. The higher-protein wheat is also more expensive because yield per acre is lower, forcing farmers to price it higher. At Barilla, virtually all wheat for North American production comes from Arizona and North Dakota, although some comes from Canada.

When setting out to “reinvent” pasta, Barilla considered how Americans consume it. Foremost, unlike Italians who view pasta as a primo piatto, or first plate in a sequential, multi-course meal—with a portion size akin to that of a side dish—Americans treat pasta as a main course. American adults tend to add a lot of meat or seafood and cheese to pasta dishes, whereas kids want their pasta simple, say, with butter and a little cheese.

Because pasta sales are driven by families with small children, a new pasta would have to be kid-friendly, Dagher says. “No taste or texture tradeoff. Mothers are not going to have a fight every night. It’s as simple as that. So we set out to research what balanced nutrition in pasta means.” Any pasta that appealed to adults but not kids would, at best, be a niche product.

“It was very obvious that the only way we were going to differentiate ourselves is if we were medically credible,” says Dagher, which is why he conferred with some 30 top nutritionists and dietitians and with entities such as the American Dietetic Association, Chicago, and the USDA. “Also, ‘natural’ and ‘balanced’ in the consumer’s mind are key. So everything had to be natural in the sense of being naturally good for you. We weren’t talking simply additives and preservatives; the ingredients couldn’t be man-made, even if you can make a case that they have been tested and are harmless. We wanted everything to come from natural sources that have been tried over centuries.”

“We raised the protein index level of pasta from the mid-30s to something equivalent to a good-quality meat,” Dagher says. “For an average-size adult, 100 grams of Barilla PLUS will give you virtually all your protein requirements per day. Kids and athletes need more than that. But this is only one meal, and there aren’t many products on the market today that can give you the same protein quality as meat. But what counts more than anything else is the quality, which is the building block of the protein. If we had the same distribution of 10 essential amino acids and twice the current PLUS protein, it wouldn’t be an advantage. Quality of protein is more important than quantity.” Additionally, he notes, meat protein often is accompanied by saturated fat. “PLUS has only 2% fat, and all of it is omega-3.”

Because the omega-3 in the pasta comes from flaxseed oil, a method was sought to incorporate the oil into the pasta without exposing it to air. “Once you break the seed and expose the oil, you get oxidation very easily,” Dagher says. “So one of the key things we had to work on was putting flaxseed in pasta and keeping it stable. Whole flaxseed is useless, because you cannot digest it, so you have to grind it. But in ground flaxseed, you’re exposing the oil. We had to process it in a way that it was absorbed by and bonded inside the pasta.”

Hundreds of PLUS prototypes failed because they didn’t mimic the ideal eating qualities and flavor of traditional pasta. “For example, our initial prototypes, even after we fixed the color, texture, graininess and what have you, didn’t have pasta characteristics because they crumbled in your mouth,” Dagher says.

Barilla also had to give the pasta a smooth-as-silk surface to ensure against breakage during cooking and achieve desired mouthfeel, particularly among children. Because of the courser quality of ground ingredients, Barilla needed to “redensify” the product.

To that end, the company engineered special dies for extruding, identical to traditional bronze dies used in Italy, but with an inner coating of Teflon to minimize the microscaling that occurs thanks to imperfections in the surface area of bronze dies. “That deformation lowers the quality of the pasta, and allows water to penetrate under the skin,” Dagher says. “Teflon is very slippery and very smooth, and since you extrude pasta at a very high pressure, you have minimum resistance. It produces a very smooth surface.”

When the ideal product emerged, it delivered a bonus Barilla hadn’t counted on. While it took longer to boil to reach al dente texture, cooked PLUS also yielded 15% to 20% greater volume than traditional cooked pasta. So Barilla redesigned its dies to create thinner pasta cuts to yield cooked volume closer to that of traditional cooked pasta. Today, the pasta still takes a little longer to boil than traditional pasta (each box mentions the longer cooking time), but produces similar cooked volume.

“This was our first entry into what we consider our ‘better-for-you’ segment of the pasta category,” says Angie Goldberg, pasta brand manager, Barilla USA. “What existed were some whole-wheat pastas that were very niche, before the whole-grain trend really took off. At the time, it was very important for us to launch something unique to the category.”

Dagher notes that the release of PLUS—with its higher-protein, lower-carb profile—coincided with the height of the Atkins movement, although the product, in development before the wind had fully caught Atkins’ sails, wasn’t timed to meet that demand.

Rather, what has made PLUS so successful, Goldberg says, is not merely its health benefits, but the flavor. “When we initially launched, we really targeted moms with picky eaters, because a lot of younger children want just plain pasta, and moms worry about getting them the protein they need,” she says.

Barilla promoted PLUS through national cable and TV advertising, as well as a national print campaign embracing women’s, parenting and healthy-lifestyle magazines. “We were going after a core market of those interested in nutrition and moms interested in providing nutrition,” Goldberg says. PR outreach included product samples and information to nutritionists bearing the tagline, “Experience the Next Generation of Pasta.” Shelf-talk signs in supermarkets called shoppers’ attention to PLUS, and coupons at checkout targeted consumers based on their shopping habits.

Since Barilla PLUS launched in early 2005, several other pasta brands have introduced multigrain pastas with some benefits of PLUS such as omega-3 or higher protein. As Goldberg says, the better-for-you pasta segment continues to grow.

Brent T. Frei is the proprietor of Frei & Associates, a full-service marketing and public-relations firm specializing in food and foodservice based in Schaumburg, IL, outside Chicago. Previously, he was director of marketing for the American Culinary Federation, Inc., based in St. Augustine, FL. Additionally, Frei was a foodservice editor for 15 years.