A Century of Pasta. De Cecco and The Italian Culture of Food

Good afternoon to everybody, and thank you very much to Luca and all of you for having me here. I’ll go straight to the presentation because half an hour is not much, and being Italian I talk a lot, so for me it would be a six-hour intervention. Let me give you a feel of who I am: I have dual Italian and US citizenship, married with one son in Los Angeles and a daughter in high school in New York. I have a degree in economics and business administration from Rome University, and I’ve worked 36 years in consumer goods, 29 of them at Unilever. I started in finance, moved to marketing and sales, and in 1995 I was put in charge of Bertolli olive oil after Unilever bought it. I ran that business globally until Unilever sold it in 2008. I was sold with the business to a Spanish company that sent me to Houston to merge olive oil with a rice business. After four years there, the company had financial problems, I got a severance package, and then I consulted until the De Cecco opportunity came. I moved to New York three years ago and have been with De Cecco since. We are growing and there is a huge opportunity in the US.

The title of my talk is ‘Agent of Pasta: De Cecco in Italian Culture of Food,’ but I want to spin it as a sort of innovation through tradition. De Cecco has kept doing the same thing for 130 years, which is now innovative because the rest of the industry went in a different direction. The founder in 1886 invented the first way to dry pasta indoors in a factory, replicating the low-temperature sun-drying process. This changed the pasta industry forever. We still use the same low-temperature, long-time drying method with bronze dies, which gives the pasta a rough surface to hold sauce and a homogeneous cooking quality. Our factory in Fara San Martino uses pure mountain spring water. The company has been family-run, with the third-generation president and a fifth-generation Beatrice training in New York. De Cecco has been sold in the US since 1893 when it won a prize at the Chicago World’s Fair. Today we are the first premium pasta in Italy and around the world, with about $500 million in sales, half exported.

Why is one pasta different from another? In Italy, pasta must be made from 100% durum wheat semolina, and the law forbids other ingredients. In the US, there is no such law, so most pasta is made with soft wheat or blends. De Cecco uses only the core of durum wheat, with a coarser semolina and higher gluten content. Our drying process takes 18 to 36 hours at low temperature, using bronze dies that cost more and slow production. Most industrial pasta uses Teflon dies and high-temperature drying for one to two hours, which creates a hard shell and uneven cooking. Our pasta cooks uniformly, stays al dente even if overcooked a few minutes, and does not become mushy. We also use cold mountain water (56°F) to make the dough, which is harder but preserves the wheat’s integrity. Every batch is certified by DNV to meet our strict quality standards. The result is excellent culinary performance: taste, smell, texture, and the ability to hold sauce without needing a ton of it. For about a dollar more per pound, you get a product that is far superior.

The US pasta market is $1.5 billion at retail, but it is very commodity-driven with heavy promotion. Main competitors are Barilla, Ebro (which owns many regional brands like Ronzoni and Prince), American Italian Pasta Company (Mueller's), and private label. Barilla is very successful but sells a product in the US that could not be sold in Italy because it uses soft wheat, yet they claim to be ‘the choice of Italy.’ That is misleading. Despite this, De Cecco is growing, and in the last 52 weeks we were the only brand in the top 15 to gain volume while holding a premium price. There is a trend toward food discovery: people want to know what is in their food and who makes it. De Cecco is the perfect pasta for that. We also care about the environment: our cartons are made from virgin fiber to avoid flavor contamination, and we replant trees to offset the paper used.

Italian food is based on very few simple ingredients of high quality. Take pizza: just dough, tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. If any ingredient is poor, the result is poor. Similarly, Japanese cuisine requires outstanding fish for sushi. This emphasis on quality comes from Italy’s history as a poor country: people could not afford much, so what they ate had to be good, tasty, and healthy. The philosophy is ‘small quantity of good stuff is better than a lot of rubbish.’ Conviviality is also key—Italian meals are for sharing, not eating alone in front of the TV. These values are now part of the global food discourse, and De Cecco embodies them. Thank you.