Barilla is made in Iowa, and a court just said the flag never claimed otherwise

The Sunday Teardown · Pantry

Barilla is the biggest pasta brand in the United States, and almost none of it has been to Italy. The blue box in your pantry was filled in Ames, Iowa or Avon, New York, from durum wheat grown mostly in the northern plains, and the side panel says so in plain English: made in the U.S.A. with U.S.A. and imported ingredients. On September 30 a federal judge in California threw out a 4 year class action that said the front of that box, with its green, white and red and the line Italy's #1 Brand of Pasta, had promised something else.

The judge was right, and I want to spend this issue on why, because the answer is more interesting than the lawsuit. A flag on a food package tells you who owns the company. It doesn't tell you where the wheat grew, where the box was filled or how the pasta was dried, and the law in both countries has been built around that distinction for a long time. Italy, which cares about this more than anyone, passed a rule in 2018 that makes a pasta box sold there name the country the wheat came from, and the reason it needed that rule is that Italian pasta runs on about 40% foreign wheat.

So the question a pasta box can't answer with a flag is the question to ask. What makes pasta taste Italian happens in two machines, the die and the dryer, and a plant in Iowa can set those two machines any way it likes. This issue follows a bushel of North Dakota durum through the Ames mill and onto the line, puts the Barilla box next to an imported De Cecco box that costs nearly twice as much, and works out what the difference actually buys.

The ingredient list on a Barilla Classic Blue Box reads semolina (wheat), durum wheat flour, then the enrichment: niacin, iron as ferrous sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid. A 2 ounce serving, which is 56 grams and about an eighth of the box, has 200 calories, 1 gram of fat, no sodium, 42 grams of carbohydrate, 3 grams of fiber and 7 grams of protein. The front of the box says Barilla is a family owned Italian company making pasta since 1877, which is true. The side says made in the U.S.A. with U.S.A. and imported ingredients, which is also true. The phrase the lawsuit was about, Italy's #1 Brand of Pasta, is true as well. Barilla has the largest share of Italy's dry pasta market, and the company says it took the line off the box in a redesign that started before the suit was filed.

Semolina. The coarse, sandy fraction that comes off a mill when it grinds durum, the hardest wheat grown, which is what makes pasta hold together in boiling water. Durum has more protein than bread wheat and a different kind of gluten, strong but not very elastic, which is why durum is good for pasta and poor for bread. The yellow color is the wheat's own carotenoid pigment, and a good semolina is judged on that color as much as on protein.

Durum wheat flour. The second ingredient, and the one that separates this box from the imported one next to it. When durum goes through the roller mill it comes off as a range of particle sizes, from coarse semolina down to a fine flour. US law lets a pasta maker use any of them, so Barilla blends in the fine fraction, which hydrates faster, runs faster and uses more of the kernel. De Cecco lists only durum wheat semolina and says it keeps the grind deliberately coarse to protect the gluten. Both are durum. One is a wider cut of the same wheat.

The enrichment. Niacin, iron, thiamine, riboflavin and folic acid are there because the box says enriched macaroni product, and FDA's standard of identity for that food sets the levels: 4 to 5 milligrams of thiamin a pound, 13 to 16.5 of iron, and so on. Italian pasta sold in Italy has none of this. The imported De Cecco in a US store does, with iron as ferrous lactate instead of ferrous sulfate, because De Cecco adds it for the American box. So the enrichment on a label doesn't tell you where the pasta was made. It tells you where it was sold.

The lawsuit, filed in June 2022, was brought by two Californians who said they bought Barilla angel hair and spaghetti in 2021 looking for Italian pasta and took the slogan and the colors to mean it was made in Italy with Italian wheat. The court let the case go forward in 2022 and certified a California class in 2024. On September 30 of this year a magistrate judge in the Northern District of California granted Barilla summary judgment, which means the case ended without a trial because no reasonable jury could have found for the plaintiffs on the evidence.

Two things decided it. The first was the sentence itself. The judge read Italy's #1 Brand of Pasta the way it reads, as a claim about how Barilla sells in Italy, and found that a sentence which can be read two ways isn't false just because one reading is wrong. Once the front was ambiguous rather than false, the court could read the side panel with it, and the side panel says made in the U.S.A. The second was the survey. The plaintiffs' expert asked 582 people whether the phrase suggested the ingredients came from Italy, and 57% said yes. The judge excluded it because the question told people what to see before asking what they saw. Barilla's own survey let people say what they thought the phrase meant, and more than 80% of them landed on popularity in Italy. Without a survey of their own, the plaintiffs had two shoppers' recollections, and California's standard is a significant share of reasonable consumers, not two of them.

That's the law, and I think it's the right law. What gets me is not the ruling. It is that a sentence with one true meaning was set in Italy's colors on the front of the box while the true meaning that mattered was printed on the side, and a marketing department knew exactly which one a shopper would carry to the register. Both things are true at once, and the court only had to rule on one of them. It took 4 years and 2 surveys to settle that a sentence about Italy was about Italy, and somewhere a billing partner is very fond of the pasta category.

Which leaves the question the box can't answer with a flag, and the one the rest of this issue is about. If the country isn't what makes a pasta Italian, what is?

Below the line for paid subscribers. I follow the wheat from a North Dakota elevator into the mill Barilla built beside its plant in Ames, then down the line through the mixer, the vacuum extruder and the dryer, and explain why the die and the drying temperature, not the country, decide what the pasta is like on the fork. Then the box gets priced line by line against the De Cecco next to it, which is made in Italy, slow dried for 9 to 18 hours depending on the shape and shipped across an ocean through a tariff, and I close with the anti-dumping fight that nearly doubled the price of imported pasta this year and what I buy.