Product line managers and commercial buyers are asking for new ideas for pan and ready-to-serve meals and especially for interesting sauces, diversified components made from meat, poultry, and fish and attractive side dishes.
Depending on the dish, pasta is on the plan, side dishes, as well as main components. For both, the trade analysts have been increasingly requesting spaghetti, tagliatelle, linguine & co, such as those common in gastronomy.
There are 600 different kinds of pasta worldwide. The oldest noodle recipe is about 4,000 years old and comes from China. The Greeks and Romans got to know pasta in the 4 century BC. Today, it is popular all over the world; its sales areas are focused on Central and Southern Europe, the entire American continent as well as Turkey. It has been the most important side dish for decades in many countries; according to one of the statistics of the European Association of Pasta Manu-facturers UN.A.F.P.A. Italians consume, for instance 26 kg/year, Greeks 11, US Americans 8.8, Germans 8, and Russians 6 kg per person a year.
The status with pan meals
Even if the Association doesn’t differentiate between the figures, it can be assumed that the larg-est part of the 3.2 million tons of pasta, which is produced all over the EU, can be allocated to dried goods. It is the most important ingredient for snacks in beakers or bags, dried products in folding cardboard boxes (often with a sauce packed separately), deep-frozen resp. cooled pan meals or long-life ready-to-serve meals in compartment food trays or cans. If one analyses the offers within the marketplace, one finds mostly simple dishes with short cut pasta like penne, rigatoni or fusilli, combined with sauces like Bolognese, Napoletana, tomato-mozzarella, etc. With deep-frozen and cooled articles, innovative manufactures use spaghetti, tagliatelle, linguini and similar types of pasta successfully, frequently combined with meat, high-quality mushrooms, fish or seafood. These ready-to-serve meals can be found in well-run deep-freezers, freezer cabinets or refrigerators in large hypermarkets. The pasta in these dishes is especially aromatic, if they were manufactured from fresh dough, cooked afterwards and then deep-frozen.
Benchmark: dishes from innovative gastronomes
Product line managers experience that new products bring activity on the shelves of pan meals and ready-to-serve dishes if the customers recollect, while eating, a successful visit to a restaurant. When one analyses their menus, one finds there mostly dishes with “long” pasta, frequently thin ones like linguini, but also wide ones like pappardelle. Whether wide or thin, they are characterized by their intensive aroma and have the distinction of sugos, sauces, and pestos sticking on them superbly. The producers of ready-to-serve meals can take advantage of this product feature by noodle nest technology.
The market for pan meals is changing
Due to these gastronomical influences, more and more product line managers are putting pressure on manufacturers of ready meals to also include dishes with high-quality pasta nests into their range of products. With the very special production technology, the weight, the size as well as the form of the noodle nests can be specified depending on the packaging of the pan meal, in which the pasta is supposed to be used. It is guaranteed that the processing can follow in bags or compartment trays with all of the known dosing systems without a problem. Industrial processors of pasta nests report that the filling processes run just as efficiently as those using penne, fusilli & co.
In the past, there were supply problems with the production of noodle nests because up until the end of last year, there was only one efficient plant available in Southern Germany. At the beginning of 2014, a second one went on line in Denmark, with which the US American market will also be served. A reduction in the price for noodle nest goes hand in hand with the expansion of the manufacturing capacity and unchanged product quality; one more reason to also think about the use of “long” pasta with ready-to-serve meals in the middle price segment.
Noodles – 4,000 year old tradition
Who first made pasta dough? Was it Chinese, Arabs or Italians? And how long has it been? Ten years ago, experts suspected that the pasta is about 2,000 years old. Then the Chinese geoscientist Houyuan Lu found a clay pot stuck in the ground for millennia. He opened it and saw what looked like a tangle of spaghetti. The scientist immediately made photos. A short time later the suspected spaghetti crumbled to dust. Experts analyzed the sediments and the photos of the scientist. They came to the conclusion that they had discovered the oldest noodles in the world that had been clearly made 4,000 years ago.
In Europe pasta dishes are known since the ancient Greeks. Later on pictures of equipment for the production of pasta have been found in Etruscan tombs. The geographer Al Idrisi described in the 12th Century a fibrous or filamentary dish made from flour, which had been produced in Sicily in large quantities.
October 25 – World Pasta Day
October 25 is an important day. No, not because the Spanish painter, graphic artist and sculptor Pablo Picasso was born on this day in 1881 in Malaga. Significantly, in every case for all pasta and noodle freaks, this date is important because every year since 1995 the World Pasta Day (World Noodle Day) takes place. 40 international manufacturers have proclaimed it to attract the attention of all pasta consumers throughout the world because residents of all continents know these long, short, thin or thick noodles that are produced from durum wheat semolina, potatoes, corn, or rice. According to the International Pasta Organization (I.P.O.), manufacturers in 45 countries produce 13.6m tons of pasta. The biggest ones are Italy (3.3 m. t), the United States (2.0 m t), Brazil (1.3 m t) and Russia (1.1 m t). A total of 300 different shapes are known. Many of the meals that are cooked out of them are “global players” such as spaghetti Bolognese, which don’t have anything to do with the northern Italian city of Bologna. Supposedly, a native cook of Florence invented this name to distinguish the sauce Bolognese from a ragout Neapolitano.
The I.P.O. however, has not detected any manufacturers from Asia. In Japan, noodles such as ramen, somen, soba, udon, Hiyamugi, or Shirataki (Japan) are very popular. They are made from flour of buckwheat, wheat, or of the roots of the “devils tongue” (Amorphophallus konjac). The Chinese Mie noodles are made from wheat flour with or without eggs and are comparable with Italian spaghetti. Two other types of pasta are very popular in several Asian cuisines. Rice noodles are made from rice flour, glass noodles from the starch of mung beans. There are many possibilities for World Pasta Day to use the right pasta for a delicious recipe.