There are people who open a company because they see a market. And then there are people who completely change their way of living because, at some point in their life, they start asking themselves different questions.
The history of the Minardo pasta factory was born like this.
Not from a business plan. But from a search. A research on food, on health and the relationship that exists between what we eat today and the way we will live tomorrow. Long before anyone started talking about conscious eating, biodiversity o ancient grains, Giorgio Minardo had already started studying all this.
For a very simple reason: he was curious to know what really was good food.
With a degree in electronic engineering and a job in Turin, for personal needs Giorgio approaches the world of macrobiotics. But he doesn't mean it as a trend.
Or like a diet. Rather, as a completely different way of looking at and taking in food.
That's where your perspective changes: after a macrobiotic point (still active) in Modica and begins to make his fellow citizens understand that food cannot be judged only by its taste. It matters how they are born, The soil in which the raw materials grow counts; it matters how these are transformed; it matters what they contain e.g, above all, what they don't contain.
We are at the end of the 90s of the last century and for Giorgio food ceases to be simply something to be consumed. It becomes a well-being tool. A cultural tool. And even a political gesture. Because choosing a food also means choosing the agricultural model we want to support.
It was the wheat.
When everyone talks about pasta as the final product, Giorgio begins to ask himself a different question.
Which grain does it come from?? The answer, Often, he didn't like it. Varieties selected almost exclusively to produce more. Agriculture increasingly dependent on chemistry. More and more uniform fields. Grains increasingly distant from those that had accompanied the history of Sicily for centuries. Find out, studying and informing, that one of variety of wheat most used to make pasta, from 1975, had been modified with gamma rays. So he starts looking for something else. Literally: going to meet farmers, farmers and farmers, around the Iblei and Sicily. And not simply out of nostalgia, voted to the past, but for the desire to build a different food future: fairer, healthier, more sustainable. Start a path of research and collaboration with the Experimental Station for Grain Growing of Caltagirone, dedicating himself to the multiplication and cultivation of local populations of Sicilian grains, those prior to the genetic transformations implemented by 1975.
That's where your perspective changes: after a macrobiotic point (still active) in Modica and begins to make his fellow citizens understand that food cannot be judged only by its taste. It matters how they are born, The soil in which the raw materials grow counts; it matters how these are transformed; it matters what they contain e.g, above all, what they don't contain.
We are at the end of the 90s of the last century and for Giorgio food ceases to be simply something to be consumed. It becomes a well-being tool. A cultural tool. And even a political gesture. Because choosing a food also means choosing the agricultural model we want to support.
It's not just agricultural research, but the attempt to get healthy food, as memory teaches: bring back to the fields those grains that for centuries had nourished the Sicilian people and the biodiversity of its territory.
From that work was born an idea then considered almost utopian: create a pasta produced exclusively with flours obtained from “ancient grains” Sicilians. On the street, but, it was anything but simple.
There was a lack of growers willing to invest in varieties considered not very productive and not very convenient compared to grains “modern”, farmers who accepted the challenge of less abundant harvests (more work, more risk), pure di restore dignity to seeds that told the agricultural history of Sicily.
E there were no mills willing to process them while maintaining their purity and separation; there was a lack of pasta factories available to experiment with a new product, outside the mold of traditional industry. It was necessary to rebuild an entire supply chain, starting practically from scratch.
After years of research, tests and experiments, with several mills and pasta factories, in the 2007 Giorgio Minardo makes a decisive choice: open his own artisanal pasta factory in Modica to give concrete form to his vision and directly produce your own pasta line from “ancient grains” Sicilians.
These grains have the particularity of having a very weak gluten, highly digestible, which is absorbed more easily by the intestine and does not create eating disorders.
That choice, born before the issue of biodiversity became central in the debate on agriculture and food, helped pave a new path. A road that has brought attention to an extraordinary genetic and cultural heritage, made of local flavors and peasant knowledge and a different way of understanding the relationship between men, food and environment.
The story of Giorgio Minardo is the story of a bet against the current: believe in what seemed outdated and demonstrate that the future, sometimes, it can arise precisely from the recovery of one's roots.
«Biodiversity is not a luxury.
It is the best insurance we can leave for the future"
It's a word that is often misunderstood. He finishes ancient grains, now common, was born for media needs.
Actually, they are local grains, native, authentic and specific to a territory: seeds that have not been modified to increase yield, as happened since 1975. Rediscovering them means defending the biodiversity of a territory; enhance varieties capable of maintaining a deep connection with the territory from which they come.
Each grain has its own characteristics. The native ones of Sicily they are more resistant to drought and disease and being tall in size (Also 180 cm), they suffocate the weeds themselves and they do not require interventions and chemical products.
This is why we are not interested in standardizing everything. Nature is not standard. And we don't want it to become that way.
Many start by wondering how to get certified. We went the opposite way. We decided first how we wanted to farm.
The certification it came later, in the 2018. For us, organic means working without looking for shortcuts.
Accept that nature has its times. Respect the terrain and make the right rotations. Protect beneficial insects. Defend the fertility of the fields. Produce less, if necessary. Because impoverished soil produces impoverished food. And we don't want this.
The story of Giorgio Minardo is the story of a bet against the current: believe in what seemed outdated and demonstrate that the future, sometimes, it can arise precisely from the recovery of one's roots.
This sentence, over the years, it has become the compass of every decision, inside the Minardo farm. Before turnover. Before fashion. Before market demands.
If a product does not convince Giorgio Minardo from a nutritional point of view, it simply doesn't enter the supply chain. It's a rule that applies to pasta. But it also applies to everything else, starting with wheat and cultivation method which must follow strict production regulations, shared with farmers.
Today thousands of people choose Minardo not only because they are looking for good pasta. They choose us because they know that behind every product there is someone who, for over twenty years, he keeps asking himself the same question:
“It's really good for people?”
We believe: