IN Brief:
- Weekly production has increased from 2.25 tonnes at the start of 2026 to 13.5 tonnes.
- Northern Pasta Co has moved into a 12,000 sq ft Carnforth factory and expanded its factory team from four to ten.
- The company intends to scale while retaining British-grown spelt, bronze-die extrusion, and slow drying.
Northern Pasta Co. has moved into a 12,000 sq ft factory in Carnforth after increasing weekly production from 2.25 tonnes at the start of 2026 to 13.5 tonnes.
The sixfold rise in weekly output marks a substantial change of scale for the business, which began in 2022 and initially produced about 1.6 tonnes of pasta a year through a market-stall operation.
Northern Pasta has invested in machinery and production skills at the Lancashire site, while the factory team has grown from four people to ten. The company says the larger operation has the potential to support roughly ten times its earlier capacity as further growth is phased in.
The manufacturing expansion follows rapid commercial development. Northern Pasta expects turnover to exceed £1 million during 2026 and plans to continue increasing output over the next three years.
The move does not alter the core production method around which the business has built its products. Northern Pasta uses British-grown spelt, extrudes the dough through bronze dies, and slow dries the finished shapes at low temperatures.
The company says its spelt is grown using regenerative farming methods and milled in the UK. Its own product information puts the drying period at around 20 hours, a process that occupies considerably more production time than rapid high-temperature drying.
That creates a different capacity problem from simply increasing extrusion speed. A pasta line can only deliver sustained output if drying, handling, packing, storage, and dispatch grow at a compatible rate.
Slow drying makes drying capacity particularly important because each batch occupies equipment for longer. Installing a faster former without expanding the downstream process can move the production bottleneck rather than eliminate it.
The 12,000 sq ft factory provides more room to organise those stages as volumes increase. Raw-material intake, mixing, extrusion, drying, packing, finished-goods storage, and dispatch all compete for floor space, while food-safety zoning and staff movement become more demanding as the operation grows.
Northern Pasta says that once the factory reaches full capacity it will be able to produce in one day what took close to two years during the earliest phase of the business. The comparison reflects the low starting point of the original operation, but it also illustrates the transition from very small batch manufacture towards a structured production site.
The company has expanded its management team alongside the factory workforce. Grace Chau has joined after working at Merchant Gourmet, while Matt Young has been appointed head of sales following previous roles with challenger food brands.
Higher production volumes make that wider organisational development necessary. Procurement, production planning, maintenance, quality assurance, stock control, sales forecasting, and customer service become harder to manage informally as the number of tonnes moving through the site increases.
Raw-material sourcing also has to scale with the factory. Northern Pasta’s proposition relies on British spelt and domestic milling, so additional output requires agricultural and milling supply to grow in step rather than simply purchasing a more readily available commodity flour.
The same applies to packaging. The company uses paper packs and describes the window as biodegradable, so increasing pasta output also increases demand for a packaging format tied closely to its existing product positioning.
Carnforth gives Northern Pasta the physical space and equipment base to manage that next phase, but higher nominal capacity still has to be converted into repeatable production. Drying cycles, line utilisation, changeovers, maintenance, staffing, raw-material supply, and finished-goods storage will determine how much of the new factory’s potential can be used consistently.
Weekly production of 13.5 tonnes shows that the expansion is already operational rather than purely planned. The next stage is to increase throughput without shortening the manufacturing process that differentiates the product or creating bottlenecks elsewhere in the factory.
That balance will determine whether Northern Pasta can move from its current sixfold increase to the larger capacity envisaged for the Carnforth site while retaining the British-spelt, bronze-die, slow-dried production model on which the business was built.
