Pasta Production: From Drying Rods to ABB Robots

Pasta production needs only flour, water, a die and a dryer, but a modern plant runs those steps as one continuous line and ships its output in bags and boxes stacked on pallets. That last stretch, packing and palletizing, is where robots first got a foothold. This post follows dry pasta from hand-rolled dough and spaghetti hung in the streets near Naples, through the first presses, extruders and drying chambers, to the packing and palletizing cells in plants today. It covers a documented ABB palletizing project in Argentina and looks at where other ABB robots could go next in a pasta plant.

An ABB IRB 660 robot stacking bags of Lucchetti pasta on a pallet at Molinos in Argentina. Photo: Eduardo Gil / ABB

How pasta was made before the machines took over

Dried pasta has a long written record. The geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, writing for King Roger II of Sicily in 1154, described itriyya made at Trabia near Palermo and shipped abroad. For centuries the work was done by hand. Dough was kneaded, pressed or rolled, then cut and hung up to dry. In Gragnano, near Naples, the main street was laid out to catch the mountain breeze mixed with sea air, back when pasta makers hung spaghetti on drying rods like laundry. If the weather turned, so did the batch.

Spaghetti drying on rods at a pasta maker in Gragnano, near Naples. Photo: Pasta Faella / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Machines came in slowly. By the beginning of the 17th century Naples had rudimentary machines for producing pasta, and the kneading machine and the press followed, which made pasta cheaper to produce. The first license for a pasta factory was issued in Venice in 1740. In 1859 Joseph Topits founded Hungary's first pasta factory in Pest, running on steam-driven machines. In the early 1900s artificial drying and extrusion let factories make more shapes in much larger volumes, the start of a period known as the industry of pasta.

A short goods pasta extruder built by the Consolidated Macaroni Machine Corporation, around 1937. Photo: Leonard J. DeFrancisci / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Over the 20th century pasta plants became continuous lines. An extruder pushes dough through a die whose shape sets the final product, and drying chambers took over from the street and the attic. Photos from American macaroni plants in the 1940s still show workers hanging long pasta on rods by hand. Packing stayed manual even longer, and stacking heavy bags on pallets was hard on the body. At Molinos in Argentina, a process engineer later said the job had caused recurring injuries on older lines. Palletizing was the job Molinos handed to robots.

A worker hangs long pasta on drying racks at the Atlantic Macaroni Company in New York, 1943. Photo: Marjory Collins, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Pasta production lines and ABB robots today

Pasta production now runs at very large volumes. A profile in The Business Download on 29 September 2026 described Barilla's plant in Ames, Iowa, which opened in 1998 as the first United States factory of a company that started as a small shop in Parma in 1877. It mills wheat and makes pasta under one roof, employs roughly 260 people, processes more than 700 tons of wheat a day and turns out about 1.2 million boxes of pasta a day on eight production lines. Output like that depends on automated weighing, bagging, case packing and palletizing at the end of each line.

A multihead weigher dosing dry pasta into bags on a packing line. Photo: Talia Makina / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has written up one pasta line in detail. Molinos, Argentina's biggest dried pasta maker, first turned to ABB robots in 2008. At its Lucchetti plant outside Buenos Aires, an IRB 660 palletizer with a 3.15 m reach and a 180 kg payload takes bags from two conveyors at up to 240 bags a minute and lays a sheet of kraft paper between layers. Molinos installed six ABB robots there, and its production manager said productivity rose by 10 percent. Before buying, the team spent three months trying layouts in RobotStudio's palletizing PowerPac.

The ABB palletizing cell at Molinos takes pasta bags from conveyors and builds pallets. Photo: Eduardo Gil / ABB

Further up the line, smaller ABB robots could handle the packing steps. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot that picks light items from a moving belt at high speed, which would suit trays of pasta nests or pouches of fresh pasta, and it can follow the belt using conveyor tracking. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is made for food areas that get washed down. We could not find ABB pasta case studies for either model, so treat them as plausible fits. Cells like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking food items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

Where robots in pasta plants are heading

For large factories, the next step is the work between the big machines. Changing dies on an extruder, moving trays of fresh pasta into treatment chambers and feeding empty cartons to the packers are still done by people in many plants. Cobots such as the GoFa CRB 15000, which can work beside staff and stop when it touches someone, could plausibly take on some of these tasks in plants with no room for fenced cells. Mobile robots like the Flexley Mover could carry pallets and empty cartons between lines.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Small pasta makers have different limits. A fresh pasta shop or a mid-sized brand making ravioli and filled shapes runs many short batches, and every product change means new grippers, new stacking patterns and new programs. For them, how easily staff can reprogram a robot counts for as much as its speed. ABB's Wizard easy programming and lead-through teaching are aimed at people who are not robot programmers, and our post on robot programming without code shows how that works in practice.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard blocks on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Some problems are still open. Robots near open food must meet strict hygiene rules and survive cleaning with water and detergents. The upfront cost of a palletizing cell is easier to justify on a line making a million boxes a day than on one making a few thousand. Plants also need technicians who can maintain robots and change programs when a new shape or bag size arrives. At Molinos, being able to test the layout in simulation before buying was part of what clinched the deal.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

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