Pappardelle alla Yorkshire? Gourmet producers inspire a boom in British pasta

The UK imports more than £1bn worth of the Italian staple a year, but now sales are taking off for makers in Yorkshire, Cumbria and beyond. Nutty, chewy and with a chestnut-brown hue, it’s a far cry from the pasta you may be used to serving with your bolognese. But the Northern Pasta Co’s products, from rigatoni to fusilli, are part of a growing wave of the Italian staple being made in the UK. The Cumbria-based company’s sales increased 357% in the year to February 2024, and from the spring its products will be sold on Ocado. Similarly, the Yorkshire Pasta Company, founded in 2019, is now stocked at more than 600 shops. Cornwall Pasta Co makes flavoured pastas, while Riverford sells pasta made by the Fresh Flour Company in Devon.

The brands all use historic, organic or regenerative British grains, and offer a premium product, at up to £5 a bag. In January, the supermarket chain Booths launched a new promotion for Northern Pasta, Yorkshire Pasta and Cornwall Pasta. “Sales are increasing week on week. We’re at the start of a British pasta revolution,” said buyer Haris Deane, adding that customers were “open to trying new varieties” of the pantry staple.

In 2023, the UK imported £1bn worth of pasta – making it the fourth-largest importer in the world – primarily from Italy. According to an Ibis World report, the “perceived superiority” of the Italian product has long limited sales of British-made ­versions, “especially in the dried pasta market.”. Most Britons eat pasta at least once a week and those behind the new British offerings – all of which focus on dried pasta – say there is a growing appetite for locally produced alternatives. Northern Pasta made its first bag of pasta in 2022. Imogen Royall was working at an artisan bakery where she would encounter “beautiful British grains”, yet at home would eat regular pasta and feel “heavy and bloated,” she said. “That’s when I put two and two together: why aren’t we using these beautiful grains to create delicious pasta?”.

Royall and her husband, Matt Kenyon, created dried spelt pasta in their kitchen, took it to a market in Kendal, and it “took off incredibly quickly,” she said. Royall believes that “pasta is one of those products people just throw into their baskets and don’t think about, but she wanted to change that. Most pasta, she says, is dried quickly at high temperatures, which makes the texture “very plasticky”.

By contrast, a slow drying process, combined with high-quality flour, locks in more of the wheat’s rich, nutty flavour. After six months, Northern Pasta was featured on the ITV cooking show James Martin’s Saturday Morning. It is still made by Kenyon and one employee. Yorkshire Pasta’s owner, Kathryn Bumby, realised there was little available on the market between “naff, yellow, shiny-like-Play-Doh” supermarket pasta and “high-end” product imported from Italy. “There was nothing in the middle, nothing British, and everything was packaged in plastic,” she said. “We saw an opportunity.”.

Bumby drove around the country speaking to deli owners to gauge interest and visited Italy to learn how to make dried pasta. “Pasta is phenomenal in Italy,” Bumby told the Observer. “It’s made so much slower and gentler, it’s all about the ingredients, getting the right wheat. If you make pasta correctly, you can get that characteristic out of the grain.” She compares high-quality pasta to sourdough bread: “Fresh pasta is seen as superior in England. In Italy it’s not at all.”.

British customers have become more invested in what they are cooking and eating, Bumby believes, particularly since Covid. Having launched just before the pandemic, she said “the timing couldn’t have suited us better”. “People wanted a nice story, this English girl making pasta in Yorkshire. It just took off.”. Yorkshire Pasta is now sold at Booths, but Bumby doesn’t want to enter nationwide supermarkets. Earlier this year, Fine Food Digest magazine ran a survey of shop owners asking them what sold well, and Yorkshire Pasta’s range came third in the pasta category, behind two Italian brands.