PARMA, Italy--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 18, 2025--
How can we bring the excellence of Italian culinary tradition into the future? How can we transform everyday products into experiences that surprise the senses, create emotions, and accompany people in moments of pleasure, sharing, and discovery? The answer for Barilla Group is the Barilla Innovation & Technology Experience (BITE) in Parma, marking the company’s most significant investment in food innovation in recent years. With almost 14,000m², more than €20 million invested and an additional €2 million per year dedicated to equipment upgrades, BITE stands as a global hub designed to foster development across the Group’s portfolio. Pasta, sauces, and bakery become a territory of exploration here, where research and technology serve Barilla's passion for good food.
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Rooted in an approach of collaboration with leading international minds, this new Innovation Center brings together a team of 200highly skilled experts, including food technologists, researchers, engineers, designers, professional tasters and chefs, to develop the next generation of Barilla high-quality food products. Each year, 30 young talents from both Italy and abroad join Barilla’s RDQ community through dedicated internship or other post-graduate programs, with interns coming from countries such as Turkey, Belgium, Greece, and Spain over the past two years. The center is also the beating heart of an open innovation ecosystem that already has 84 active collaborations with universities and research centers in Italy and around the world.
“At Barilla, where the product has always been at the heart of everything we do, we know that a fundamental part of our work is to imagine and create quality products that must respond and adapt to people’s evolving needs,” says Guido Barilla, Chairman of the Barilla Group. “The BITE, in addition to shaping what will be the products of tomorrow, represents a very clear entrepreneurial choice. Barilla must drive and anticipate trends and be able to engage with markets that are increasingly more open and international.”
WHERE EVERY STEP OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT COMES TO LIFE
Deeply rooted in the heart of the Food Valley where Barilla was born, BITE operates with a global vision: this is where products for all the Group’s brands are developed, bringing the taste of Italy to more than 100 countries. The BITE brings together all stages of food innovation under one roof. Within its 4,800 m², the Innovation Center features dedicated areas for Design Thinking where brainstorms turn into product ideas, tasting and sensory research, and experimental kitchens for pasta and bakery. An additional 9,000 m² of pilot plants host advanced research laboratories and experimental production lines where Barilla’s professionals develop, test and refine new products and processes, together with designing innovative packaging solutions and applying advanced tools to ensure outstanding food quality and safety.
Here, the journey from concept to market takes shape, a process that typically spans around 2 years (and up to 10 for the more complex projects) from researching in the selection of crop varieties and selecting ingredients to recipe development and sensory testing with both expert panels and consumers.
"Innovatingmeans placing people’s desires at the center,” explains Michele Amigoni, Head of RDQ at Barilla Group.“Understanding in depth how their needs related to food and nutrition will evolve, and from there turning ideas into reality that are new, good, and sustainable. The BITE will be a center open to the world, where it will be possible to see, touch, and understand how Barilla envisions the future of food. "
At the BITE, technologies such as the electronic nose and AI-driven smart sensors optimize processes, from mapping aromatic profiles to enhancing pasta drying. 3D printing and holographic design systems enable rapid prototyping and faster development cycles, while the rugosimeter (roughness meter) precisely measures pasta texture at the micron scale, providing valuable data to refine both product quality and the sensory experience. These tools accelerate experimentation and ensure consistency, helping deliver the same Barilla quality to consumers around the world.
COLLABORATING GLOBALLY TO DRIVE INNOVATION
The BITE is the core of an international open innovation network of 84 partnerships with universities, research institutions, and organizations worldwide, from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany to Purdue University in the US and Wageningen University in the Netherlands, as well as with selected agrifood and tech startups. Since 2019, Barilla’s Good Food Makers accelerator has generated over 1,200 startup applications from 41 countries and launched 28 collaborations, ranging from sustainable indoor agriculture to AI-driven logistics and ingredient traceability.
INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE SPACES
Designed with sustainability and inclusion at its core, the BITE runs on renewable electric energy and is surrounded by research areas dedicated to the development of regenerative agriculture practices. Through a partnership with Dynamo Academy an Italian social enterprise promoting inclusive design, the building features fully accessible environments, tactile maps and flexible spaces, ensuring a welcoming experience for all.
BARILLA INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY EXPERIENCE - NUMBERS
Guido, Paolo and Luca Barilla. © Barilla
WASHINGTON (AP) — After the arrest of a man charged with placing two pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national parties on Jan. 5, 2021, the warning from the Trump administration was clear: If you come to the nation's capital to attack citizens and institutions of democracy, you will be held accountable.
Yet Justice Department leaders who announced the arrest were silent about the violence that had taken place when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol and clashed with police one day after those bombs were placed.
It was the latest example of the Trump's administration's to rewrite the history of the riot, through pardons and the firings of lawyers who prosecuted the participants of the siege, and of the disconnect for a government that prides itself for cracking down on violent crime and supporting law enforcement but has papered over the brutality of the Jan. 6 attacks on police officers.
“The administration has ignored and attempted to whitewash the violence committed by rioters on Jan. 6 because they were the president's supporters. They were trying to install him a second time against the will of the voters in 2020,” said Michael Romano, who prosecuted the rioters before leaving the Justice Department this year. “And it feels like the effort to ignore that is purely transactional.”
The White House referred comment to the Justice Department, which referred comment to the FBI. The bureau did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press on Friday.
FBI Director Kash Patel, as a conservative podcast host during the Biden administration, had called the Jan. 6 rioters “political prisoners” and offered to represent them for free. But on Thursday, he said the arrest of the pipe bomb suspect, 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr., was in keeping with Trump's commitment to “secure our nation's capital.”
“When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack the nation’s capital, you attack the very being of our way of life,” Patel said. “And this FBI and this Department of Justice stand here to tell you that we will always combat it.”
Patel's deputy, Dan Bongino, had suggested before joining the FBI that federal law enforcement had wasted time investigating Jan. 6 rioters and anti-abortion activists.
“These are threats to the United States?” he said on a podcast last year. “Grandma is in the gulag for a trespassing charge on January 6th.”
Bongino indicated last year he believed the pipe bomb incident was an “inside job” that involved a “massive cover-up.” After joining the FBI, Bongino repeatedly described t the investigation as a top priority that was receiving significant resources and attention.
“We were going to track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away,” he said Thursday.
No public link has emerged between the pipe bombs and the riot, and Cole's arrest was a significant development in a long-running investigation that had confounded authorities, who are now are assembling a portrait of Cole. People familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that among the statements Cole made to investigators is that he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, which Trump has insisted was stolen from him in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. The people were not authorized to discuss ongoing investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
There was no widespread fraud in that election, which a range of election officials across the country, including Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican governors in key states crucial to Biden’s victory have also vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies were dismissed by the courts.
The tough-on-crime words heard during Thursday's announcement about Cole's arrest were at odds with the Republican administration's repeated efforts to play down the violence of Jan. 6, absolve those charged in the insurrection and target those who investigated and prosecuted the rioters.
Trump’s clemency action on his first day back in the White House in January applied to all 1,500-plus people charged with participating in the attack on the foundations of American democracy. That included defendants seen on camera violently attacking police with makeshift weapons such as flagpoles, a crutch and a hockey stick. More than 100 police officers were injured, including some who have described being scared for their lives as they were dragged into the crowd and beaten.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department asked the FBI for the names of agents who participated in Jan. 6 investigations, a demand feared within the bureau for as a possible precursor to mass firings. In August, Patel fired Brian Driscoll, who as the FBI's acting director in the early days of the Trump administration resisted handing over those names.
Trump's administration, meanwhile, has fired or demoted numerous prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, including more than two dozen lawyers who had been hired for temporary assignments to support the investigation but were moved into permanent roles after Trump won the 2024 election.
In October, two federal prosecutors were locked out of their government devices and told they were being put on leave after filing court papers that described those who attacked the Capitol as a “mob of rioters.” The Justice Department later submitted a new court filing that stripped mentions of the Jan. 6 riot.
One man whose case was dismissed because of Trump’s pardons was accused of hurling an explosive device and a large piece of wood at a group of officers who trying to defend an entrance to the Capitol. Some officers later said they had “believed they were going to die,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, and several reported suffering temporary hearing loss.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel stand during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
FILE - This image shows part of a "Seeking Information" notice released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding pipe bombs planted outside offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, on the eve of the attack on the Capitol. (FBI via AP, File)
Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel look at each other during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
