The Technical & Research Director for the company is Engineer Renato Dall’Agata, who we interviewed to ask about the most cutting-edge solutions that the company is providing for its clients.
What does innovation mean to you?
I would start with our Chairman, Enrico Fava’s motto – always be one step ahead of your competition. It is safe to say that Mr. Enrico Fava has discovered some of the most advanced technologies in the pasta drying field. We must always be one step ahead of technological added value, in terms of quality, to obtain the best possible pasta from the raw materials you have available.
That said, innovation means responding to the needs of today’s market, which are more and more oriented towards economic and environmental sustainability. It also means contributing to satisfying the growing demand for food on a global level, due to demographic growth. In order to do so, everyone must do their part. We develop technologies that can apply unconventional and local raw materials because, unfortunately, many countries in the southern hemisphere import cereals and are vulnerable to price increases as we have experienced over the last two years due to the geopolitical situation.
Being able to use local or unconventional raw materials and transform them into good quality pasta that has good cooking resistance, does not overcook, is a healthy, nutritious and longlasting product, releases carbohydrates slowly and does not require chilling or something else to be stored and maintained, well... this is important.
What do you mean by unconventional raw materials?
Let me explain. Innovation, in my opinion, must make flexible processes possible that can also use raw materials that are not common in the western world, like buckwheat, sorghum, corn etc…; raw materials which are popular in regions of the planet characterized, as I said earlier, by strong demographic development, such as sub-Saharan Africa or South America.
Our company, with the most advanced pasta technologies, contributes to satisfying these requests for healthy, good and economically accessible products.
What are the characteristics that most distinguish you?
Technology is our main “warrior”, without a doubt. We manufacture long-cut pasta, short-cut pasta, specialty pasta and couscous process lines. These high-capacity industrial lines can produce up to 12,000 kg of shortcut pasta and 6000 kg of long pasta per hour. We have the largest couscous line, which produce up to 2400 kg of product per hour. These are fully automatic lines with advanced production technologies. The lines called GPL 180 and TCM 100, for long-cut pasta and short-cut pasta respectively, represent the best available on the market today in terms of quality, energy savings and cost reduction over the entire lifecycle of the line, aimed at maximizing finished product quality with the available raw materials.
For example, durum wheat availability is much lower than that of soft wheat and soft wheat-based pasta, which from a pasta-making point of view is inferior, is spreading. The lower quality raw materials can be optimized with our technology, which is also patented in various strategic countries around the world.
The overall efficiency of our systems is high: we have system that work even after ten, fifteen years with an overall efficiency of 97-98%. This is our second strongest point thanks to the quality of the equipment we manufacture and to the services we provide. I want to underline that we offer both industrial and artisan pasta production “turnkey” solutions in every part of the world: from the raw material storage system up to the product on the pallet, ready to be loaded onto the truck.
We can offer and supply the entire chain, together with our specialized partners. 90% of our equipment is exported. To conclude, I wish to mention the excellent quality-price ratio of the finished product which is the result of what I said before: the use of poorer protein-based raw materials, which are less expensive and provide, nonetheless, finished products of acceptable quality.
We provide truly cutting-edge services for the pasta business, developed directly in our laboratory.
We carry out dough tests, chemical, physical and rheological analysis on raw materials and we evaluate the finished product to provide the best solution to the customer.
We were also among the first in our field to embrace IoT, with all the technologies that constitute it, to create value added services.
Fava has always been ahead of its time to promptly respond to the real demands of pasta producers.