In a series of events leading up to World Pasta Day on October 25th, 2020, Barilla, along with the Future Food Institute, and Food for Soul, have teamed up to promote the Mediterranean diet, food consciousness, sustainability, and overall wellbeing. The most recent event featured Iulia Nonu, the Team Head Chef, Refettorio Felix at St. Cuthbert’s Centre from Food for Soul, in addition to Lorenzo Boni, the Barilla Executive Chef in North America.
We wanted to learn more about what Barilla is doing in regard to sustainability and how they’re managing the company through the current Covid crisis, so we went one on one with Lorenzo Boni to get his insight.
Can you please tell us a bit about you and your background?
I was born and raised in Bologna, Italy, and I came to this country 16 years ago. Before that, I had my own restaurant in Bologna for 10 years and even before that, I travelled extensively around Europe and the US just to learn from the best chefs. Now I’m the head chef for Barilla in North America, which includes Canada and Mexico and we develop recipes for the company. Right now, it's a little different [because of Covid], but generally speaking, we also sponsor about 180 events a year.
Barilla came out with the Double Pyramid to promote a healthy Mediterranean diet, lifestyle, and sustainability. Can you explain the Double Pyramid?
The Double Pyramid was created by the Barilla Food and Nutrition Center, which is an institution founded by Barilla, but is independent and a nonprofit. Its purpose is finding solutions to food crises around the world. After substantial research, in 2011, they featured the Double Pyramid. Basically, you have the typical Mediterranean diet pyramid on one side and on the other side, is a pyramid upside down that shows you the impact that each food group has on the environment. And if you take the Mediterranean pyramid, and you put it upside down, it looks very much like the other pyramid, which tells you that the Mediterranean diet is not only very healthy for you, but also has a very low impact on the environment. It's perfect for explaining to people that eating healthy is also a great way to make the planet more sustainable.
What kinds of things is Barilla doing in regard to sustainability?
I can tell you from the chef perspective, that every time we develop recipes for the company, we always do the exercise of calculating the carbon footprint. And we always try to keep that minimal. I will feature recipes that are always very sustainable. And on top of that, we’re working really hard to make the farming the company does as sustainable as possible. I believe that over the last 20 years, they reduced the water consumption for farming by 80 or 90%. I might be a little off on the numbers, but it’s a huge amount. Right now, we are also transitioning into more sustainable packaging. We are getting rid of all the plastic windows on the boxes that we had and making it all cardboard instead.
What is Barilla doing to help with food insecurity around the globe?
We support local community food banks with both monetary and/or product donations in the communities in which we operate, specifically New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Ames, IA. We ensure these food banks are stocked with between 1 and 2 million meals worth of Barilla pasta throughout the year.
Over the last decade, our more than $750,000 support of various Food Bank for NYC projects alone where we have “adopted” the Community Kitchen & Food Pantry in Harlem which helps feed 100,000 people per month. Our partnership with the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank includes support of its Mobile Food Pantry (MFP) program, which serves areas in Los Angeles County that do not have adequate access to food assistance programs, such as pantries and soup kitchens. Every month, we provide pasta to clients that can be used with the fresh vegetables they procure from the Mobile Food Pantry.
In Chicago, we are proud to partner with Urban Grower’s Collective to advance their mission to cultivate nourishing environments which support health, economic development and healing through urban agriculture. Barilla supplies the pasta that is included with the produce being sold, and the Urban Grower’s Collective program reaches 10,000 community members in nine neighborhoods and delivers 17,000 lbs. of fresh produce annually.
We’ve also partnered with Caterina’s Club whose mission is to provide warm meals, affordable housing assistance and job training to homeless and low-income families throughout Southern California. Our product donations help Caterina’s Club deliver over 25,000 meals to underserved kids in Orange County every week.
Lastly, our teaching kitchens have a presence at food and wine events across the country and also partner with various nonprofits, including Big Green, Common Threads, Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indian and Harlem Grown. More than 75% of our experiential events supported communities in need in 2019.
What do you say to people who don't have access to the Mediterranean diet’s ingredients?
The Mediterranean diet isn’t just a diet, it’s more of a lifestyle. The beauty of the Mediterranean diet is that it doesn't exclude you from any categories of food. For instance, the Mediterranean diet might call for broccoli and tomatoes or eggplant, but if you don't have access to those, you can use something like Bok choy or any other Asian vegetable that has a similar nutritional value. We have been working on recipe builders that are basically our mix and match tools where you can build recipes that are very healthy and under 500 calories and we have recipe builders for 20 different regions of the world. You can do all of this on our website. We are working constantly on this and making it easier for people around the world to be successful with their local products.