Barilla, best known for its iconic blue box pasta (a staple in my home), is diving deeper into tech. Yes, really. You see, the company just opened applications for its 2025 Good Food Makers program, and this year’s twist is a new ecosystem-focused format. The goal is to use innovation to fix the food chain from farm to fork by teaming up with startups that are serious about AI, blockchain, and agtech.
Now in its seventh year, the program has already attracted more than 900 startups from 25 countries. For 2025, only three will be selected. But the pitch is big. Join a four week co-development sprint alongside Barilla professionals and key partners like Bizerba, Conad Nord Ovest, and Open Fields. It is basically a high stakes tech boot camp for food.
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This is not some shallow marketing exercise. Past winners have landed real-world deployments. One startup, Connecting Food, brought blockchain based traceability to Barilla’s fresh basil supply chain. Another, Manual.to, now powers digital training at Barilla’s Cremona factory. These are not side experiments. They are already live in production.
The 2025 edition is being run in partnership with Almacube, the innovation hub of the University of Bologna and Confindustria Emilia. That collaboration signals Barilla is looking beyond food. It is building something closer to a tech cluster. An innovation ecosystem with enough gravity to attract startups solving hard problems around sustainability, automation, and digital transformation.
This year’s challenges are clear.
AgTech for Climate Resilience. This one is about growing basil better. In partnership with Open Fields, Barilla is looking for sustainable ways to manage wild herbs and boost yield.
New Frontiers in Detection. Alongside Bizerba, the focus here is on precision tech. Think AI powered production line scanners that can spot defects before the human eye can.
Best on Shelf. With Conad Nord Ovest, startups will try to boost in store visibility and improve the retail shopping experience using digital tools.
There is something oddly refreshing about a pasta company going deep on machine learning and blockchain. But Barilla has been investing in this direction for a while. It spent €50 million on R&D in 2024 and is expanding its Parma headquarters into a 12,000 square meter innovation center.
Claudia Berti, Head of Open Innovation at Barilla, said the following:
“Good Food Makers reflects our commitment to open innovation that generates real value. This special Ecosystem edition allows us to co-create impactful solutions with strategic partners, addressing key challenges like sustainability and digital transformation.”
That may sound like standard corporate speak, but the results speak louder. Previous startups have introduced AI powered consumer research with Voxpopme and fermentation based food alternatives through Nosh Biofoods. Some of this work quietly reshapes how food gets made and delivered, and most consumers never know it.
For startups, the pitch is access. Barilla is offering real world collaboration with one of the world’s biggest food companies, plus the chance to plug tech into legacy processes. It is not often you get to test your AI on a basil field or a pasta production line.
Applications for Good Food Makers 2025 are open now and close at the end of July. The actual program runs from September through January 2026, wrapping with a final Innovation Day presentation. It is not a huge window, but for the right startup, it could mean a fast track from pitch deck to factory floor.
In a world where food systems are under pressure from climate, war, and supply shocks, Barilla’s move to connect the dots with tech makes sense. It is not just pasta anymore. It is platform thinking.
