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︎︎︎ Paolo Barilla for Financial Times 

“On a bright morning in Parma, Marta Grandi stands in the central Piazza Garibaldi clutching a banner that reads “Change Food, Save the Planet”. Clustered around the 16-year-old are about 50 mostly school-age teenagers.They decided to skip school that day, Ms Grandi says, to take part in FridaysForFuture, the global climate protest movement started by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “Business is destroying our future,” she says. The recent noisy scene, some 10 minutes walk across honey-coloured piazzas from the world’s biggest pasta maker, Barilla, brings home the immediate challenge facing Paolo Barilla, and his siblings Guido and Luca, who together run the closely-held family business in its fourth generation.
“We recently launched pasta made from red lentils,” says Mr Barilla, 58, sitting in one of a host of Barilla offices scattered across the northern Italian city. He offers a ridged tube of penne pasta half the length of a finger, which is vegan and gluten free but otherwise identical to the traditional sort made of durum wheat, as a microcosm of the forces of sustainability, food quality and changes in lifestyle uprooting Barilla’s business.” from the article by Rachel Sanderson on The Financial Times, June 2 2019