Michel Marbot is one reason that prairie durum growers get a top price
for their crops.
“I said no matter what the price, I want to buy Canadian grain,” said
Marbot, about his determination to use the best ingredients to produce
the best pasta when he started in the business in 1990.
“An Italian friend, who made top quality pasta, told me that was his
secret.”
Marbot, who was born and raised in Milan, Italy, and is a French
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citizen, bought a pasta processor in Poland in the first privatization
that occurred after the fall of communism.
His company is now the dominant pasta maker in Poland and charges a
premium price.
Many skeptics thought his high quality experiment would fail in the
struggling nation.
“Everyone was saying you’re giving caviar to the pigs. They said the
Polish consumer doesn’t know anything. Why give him such good wheat?”
said Marbot during a February visit to the Canadian Wheat Board offices
in Winnipeg.
“My answer was that the consumer doesn’t need to know. But the consumer
must receive the best if we say we offer the best. There is no way we
will play with the ignorance of the market, because that’s the best way
to lose the market.”
Marbot faced a host of problems after buying the company from the
government, ranging from fraud by dishonest millers to replacing worn
out machinery to fighting people’s refusal to believe he was serious
about making top quality pasta in Poland.
One hurdle he faced was getting good quality flour for his factory.
During the last communist years the plant had relied on “American grain
of the worst quality,” which was feed quality wheat. It was cheap, but
made bad pasta.
After Marbot bought the pasta plant, he ventured offshore to find a
supply of Canadian durum.
Over the next few months, he struck a deal for a 25,000 tonne load of
No. 1 Canada Western Amber Durum, and was pleasantly surprised when it
arrived at the Polish port of Gdansk in January 1993.
Workers unloading the durum told him they’d never seen grain that
clean. Marbot was looking forward to making his first batch of high
quality pasta.
But the mill that ground the durum sold some of it under the table to
another processor, then blended what remained with feed quality wheat.
The flour was below the quality of the grain Marbot had flown across
the world to buy.
In response, he bought his own flour mill.
He said it took him three or four years to perfect the milling, but in
the end he believed his pasta was as good as the best premium pasta
coming out of Italy.
Recently, to counter suggestions that Canadian durum lacks gluten
strength, the factor that gives pasta its snappy el denté texture,
Marbot changed his yearly order to 100 percent Navigator durum, a new
variety designed to solve the gluten strength problem.
Marbot has taken his pasta on the road and has won blind taste tests in
Italy. As well, he has managed to fight off competition from Italian
pasta on his home turf. He said Italy makes the best pasta in the
world, but often only low quality Italian pasta is shipped to poorer
markets such as Poland.
“We said to the consumer, ‘why should you buy a low quality Italian
pasta when you can buy a high quality pasta, even if it is made in
Poland?’ ” said Marbot.
