World Pasta Day 2026: Italy's pasta in numbers

Yesterday, Sunday 25 October, the world celebrated pasta.

That is not a figure of speech: World Pasta Day, now in its twenty-eighth edition, is promoted by Unione Italiana Food and the International Pasta Organisation and is celebrated every year on the same date with events, social media marathons and initiatives in dozens of countries. The idea was born in Rome in 1995, during the first World Pasta Congress, when producers from half the world decided that a food this universal deserved a day of its own.

The 2026 edition, however, brings a novelty worth telling. For the first time the day does not end after twenty-four hours but becomes a World Pasta Week, with the grand finale in Parma on 27 and 28 October, inside Cibus Tec, the international food technology fair. The figures that follow were presented in Rome on 21 October by the pasta makers of Unione Italiana Food and are, as of today, the most up-to-date picture of a sector that Italy leads without rivals.


Four million tonnes: the production record

In 2025 Italian pasta factories produced around 4.2 million tonnes of pasta, up 0.8 per cent on the previous year, out of a world production that reached 17.3 million tonnes. To understand the gap with the chasing pack, just look at the ranking: Turkey is second with 2.04 million tonnes, followed by the United States with 2 million and Egypt with 1.5. Italy alone produces more than double anyone else.

The most surprising figure, though, concerns consumption. Italians remain the world's biggest pasta eaters with 23.1 kilos per person every year, ahead of Tunisia (18.8 kilos), Hungary (17.1), Germany (16.8), Turkey and Austria (12.5). It is a number that describes a daily habit rather than a special occasion: in Italy pasta is not the dish of the feast day, it is the dish of every day, and that is precisely why celebrating it makes sense.

Behind these volumes works a supply chain that runs from the durum wheat field to the packet on the shelf. According to a study by The European House Ambrosetti, carried out through TEHA Group for Unione Italiana Food, in 2025 the extended pasta supply chain generated a turnover of 13.5 billion euros and an added value for the country of 3 billion. This is not a detail for insiders only: it means farmers, millers, pasta makers, hauliers and researchers who make a living from a food that costs a few cents per portion.



More than 60 per cent goes abroad

If production is the best-known record, export is the one that keeps the sector standing. In 2025 Italy exported 2,456,940 tonnes of pasta, 2.1 per cent more than in 2024, worth 3,969 million euros, according to Unione Italiana Food's analysis of Istat data. In practice more than 60 per cent of what leaves Italian pasta factories is sold beyond the borders, in more than 200 countries, and the value of foreign sales now equals that of domestic consumption.

Europe remains the main market: 1.3 million tonnes, 51.9 per cent of exports, went to European Union countries, with a 4 per cent increase. The remaining 48.1 per cent reached non-EU countries, with the Americas, Asia and Oceania among the growing areas. Overall Italy accounts for 48.3 per cent of world pasta trade, and this single product alone is worth 5.4 per cent of the country's entire agri-food export.

The trend did not stop with the new year. In the first half of 2026 exports grew by a further 2.7 per cent in volume compared with the same period of 2025, rising from 1,224,477 to 1,257,234 tonnes. It is a result achieved in a far from simple geopolitical context, with raw material and energy costs weighing on pasta factories, and that is exactly why Unione Italiana Food reads it as confirmation of structural solidity.


What would life be without pasta

Alongside the industrial numbers, this year the pasta makers of Unione Italiana Food wanted to answer an apparently naive question: what would Italians' lives be like if pasta disappeared from shelves and menus? The AstraRicerche institute put it to a representative sample of 1,005 people aged between 18 and 70, through online interviews. The answer is clear-cut: for almost 9 Italians out of 10, the disappearance of pasta would be a cultural impoverishment, not just a gastronomic one, and a loss of the sense of belonging.

The rest of the survey explains why. More than 3 Italians out of 4 associate pasta with pleasure and emotion (76.2 per cent) and more than 8 out of 10 consider it a symbol of Made in Italy excellence (85.2 per cent). At the same time 7 out of 10 appreciate its practical side: it is good and satisfying for 41.5 per cent, it offers good value for money for 39.6 per cent, and for 43.4 per cent it is a concrete answer to the rising cost of living, so much so that Unione Italiana Food reports an average price that has fallen by almost 24 per cent in two years.

Then there is the chapter closest to our hearts at 360ItalyMarket. For more than 7 Italians out of 10 a plate of pasta has a deeper value when eaten with the family, and the best-loved occasion is the pranzo della domenica, the Sunday lunch, named by 54.4 per cent of respondents. Anyone who has read our article on the architecture of the Italian Sunday lunch knows this is no discovery, but it is good to see it confirmed by the numbers: pasta is the glue of the Italian table, even before it is an export product.


From Rome to Parma: the World Pasta Week and the pasta makers' manifesto

The real novelty of 2026 is the calendar. The official presentation was held in Rome on 21 October, the day was celebrated yesterday around the world, and the week closes in Parma, in the heart of Italy's Food Valley, on 27 and 28 October. The meetings take place at Fiere di Parma inside Cibus Tec, running from 27 to 30 October, and bring together for the first time under one roof producers, technology partners, associations, institutions and large-scale retail representatives, both Italian and international. The World Pasta Week had been announced in May, at Tuttofood, and the choice of Parma is no accident: it is the city where the Italian food industry meets the technologies that make it work.

On the occasion of the twenty-eighth edition, the pasta makers of Unione Italiana Food also presented a ten-point programmatic manifesto. The priorities set out are building a more competitive supply chain, supporting exports, investing in young people, research and innovation, and an all-round approach to sustainability, from reducing environmental impact to packaging and the fight against waste. Margherita Mastromauro, president of the Italian Pasta Makers of Unione Italiana Food, summed up the spirit of the initiative by describing pasta as a matter of belonging and national identity, and by asking institutions for a structured dialogue to accompany companies through the changes under way. Paolo Barilla, president of Unione Italiana Food, insisted on the need to preserve what makes Italian pasta unique while investing at the same time in research, technology and new skills.


What all this means for the people who buy pasta

Behind the 2.4 million tonnes exported there are the big industrial brands, but also hundreds of small artisan pastifici, the family-run pasta workshops that work Italian durum wheat semolina, extrude it through bronze dies (trafilatura al bronzo, which gives the pasta its rough, sauce-holding surface) and dry it slowly at low temperature. These are the producers you find in the pasta section of 360ItalyMarket, and yesterday's celebration is the right excuse to look at them with different eyes: every packet that reaches your home is a fragment of that 60 per cent of production travelling the world, with the difference that it does not pass through an intermediate warehouse but arrives directly from the producer.

If you want to celebrate World Pasta Day a few days late, the simplest pairing is also the most honest one: an artisan pasta shape, an extra virgin olive oil from one of our producers and a DOP cheese grated at the last moment. Nothing else is needed to understand why 9 Italians out of 10 cannot imagine life without it.