IN Brief:
- Optiva Triticum is designed to give pasta manufacturers more flexibility when selecting wheat flour.
- Pilot-scale trials recorded firmness improvements of up to 25% in spaghetti and 11% in short-cut pasta.
- Greater tolerance of flour variability could reduce processors' exposure to changes in durum availability and pricing.
Novonesis has launched Optiva Triticum, a biosolution intended to give pasta manufacturers greater flexibility in wheat sourcing while maintaining firmness and cooking performance. The product is aimed particularly at processors seeking to use a broader range of wheat flours as durum quality, availability, and pricing fluctuate.
Pasta production gives manufacturers limited room for error when raw material specifications change. Protein quality influences dough development, extrusion behaviour, shape retention, firmness, stickiness, and the amount of material released during cooking, so a cheaper or more readily available flour is of little practical value if it pushes finished product outside an established quality specification.
Optiva Triticum is designed to strengthen the protein network within the pasta matrix, helping compensate for differences between flour types and protein levels. Novonesis says pilot-scale trials produced firmness improvements of up to 25% in spaghetti and up to 11% in short-cut pasta compared with control samples, while cooking-water turbidity fell by around 25%.
Cooking-water turbidity provides an indication of material lost from the pasta during preparation. Lower turbidity can therefore support the wider assessment of whether a formulation is retaining its structure, although commercial performance will still depend on flour composition, hydration, extrusion conditions, drying profile, product geometry, and the manufacturer’s own quality targets.
The development arrives as pasta processors continue to manage a raw material that is inherently exposed to crop conditions. Durum wheat remains closely associated with dried pasta because of its protein characteristics, colour, and ability to produce the firm texture expected in many established products, but its supply and price can move materially between harvests and regions.
Using more soft wheat can widen purchasing options, although doing so changes the technical problem inside the factory. Flour cannot simply be exchanged kilogram for kilogram on the assumption that mixing, extrusion, drying, and cooking performance will remain unchanged. Even where the recipe appears straightforward, variation in the incoming wheat can require adjustments elsewhere in the process to retain consistent output.
A formulation aid that increases tolerance to those differences can therefore shift some of the response from procurement into process engineering. Instead of maintaining a very narrow flour specification at almost any cost, a processor may be able to qualify a wider group of suppliers or blends while keeping the finished pasta within acceptable limits.
That flexibility is only useful if it remains predictable at commercial scale. Pilot results provide an indication of the product’s potential, but individual factories will still need to validate dosing, flour combinations, water addition, extrusion pressure, drying conditions, cooking performance, and sensory characteristics across their own equipment and product portfolio.
Consistency also becomes more difficult when manufacturers operate several pasta formats. Spaghetti places different physical demands on the dough and drying process from short-cut products, while thickness, shape, and surface area can influence cooking behaviour. The difference between Novonesis’ reported firmness improvements for the two formats underlines why processors cannot assume that one formulation adjustment will produce an identical result across every SKU.
Raw material flexibility has broader implications for production planning. A narrow flour specification may require processors to maintain larger safety stocks or source from a smaller supplier base, while wider tolerances can make it easier to respond to regional crop variation. The trade-off is that quality teams need enough process data to distinguish acceptable variability from changes that begin to affect finished product performance.
The development also reflects a wider trend in food processing towards designing production systems around variability rather than assuming perfectly consistent inputs. Agricultural materials rarely behave like engineered components, yet high-volume food factories are expected to produce increasingly repeatable products from them. Enzymes and other processing aids are one route to narrowing that gap, provided the effect is measurable and reproducible under factory conditions.
Novonesis is positioning Optiva Triticum around that operating problem rather than around a new consumer-facing claim. Its commercial value will depend on whether processors can convert greater flour flexibility into lower sourcing risk or more competitive formulations without increasing rejects, cooking losses, or process instability.
The next stage will therefore be commercial validation rather than another laboratory benchmark. If manufacturers reproduce the pilot-scale improvements across different wheat blends and production lines, Optiva Triticum could give pasta plants another way to manage raw material volatility without making constant changes to the product leaving the factory.
