CODE RED: Italian Pasta Is Set To Disappear From Store Shelves As 107% Tariffs Kick In

WSJ - Your favorite Italian-origin fusilli and macaroni are poised to disappear from U.S. supermarket shelves.

Italy’s biggest pasta exporters say import and antidumping duties totaling 107% on their pasta brands will make doing business in America too costly and are preparing to pull out of U.S. stores as soon as January. The combined tariffs are among the steepest faced by any product targeted by the Trump administration.

“It’s an incredibly important market for us,” said Giuseppe Ferro, La Molisana’s chief executive, whose family-run pasta factory sits on the edge of the southern Italian town of Campobasso. “But no one has those kinds of margins,” he said, shaking his head as the sweet, nutty smell of freshly ground wheat berries permeated his factory.

The U.S. Commerce Department has announced a 92% antidumping duty on pasta made in Italy by La Molisana and 12 other companies, which import the bulk of pasta from Italy to the U.S. That is on top of the Trump administration’s 15% tariff on imports from the European Union.

The Commerce Department acted after a long-running probe into pricing practices for the product that goes into everything from spaghetti Bolognese to mac and cheese. The severity of the decision has stunned one of Italy’s most iconic industries and has escalated into a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Rome, which is determined to combat the tariff.

“It would be a real shame to have the market snatched from us for no real reason,” said Ferro. La Molisana and the other companies are asking the Commerce Department to revise its assessment in its final ruling.

This is not a drill. This is not clickbait. This is our government looking at the one thing that has never wronged us as a nation, real Italian pasta, and saying, "Yeah, let's double the price of that and maybe kill it off entirely."

I am telling everybody right now- if this reported 107% tariff on Italian pasta goes through, our grocery store pasta aisles are about to look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland of sad elbows and off-brand shells.

The bastards in the U.S. Commerce Department have hit 13 Italian pasta makers with a preliminary 92% antidumping duty. That stacks on top of the existing 15% Trump-era tariff on European imports. Do the math, and you get this cursed number that keeps popping up= 107%.

And that list is not some random lineup of mob-front brands either. It includes La Molisana, Garofalo (the best), Rummo (also very solid), and the Italian-made side of Barilla (dog shit). In other words, usually the stuff you buy when you care how dinner tastes.

The Italians are saying what any sane adult would say when you drop a 107% cost bomb on their business: "We cannot make money like this. This is insane." 

Some of them are straight up saying that if this doubling the price becomes final, they are out of the U.S. market. 

One CEO basically asked, "Who is paying ten bucks for a box of pasta?" and he is not wrong. At that point, you are choosing between rigatoni and a bottle of wine. 

I did a lot of reading on this, and the official line from Commerce and the White House is that this is all part of a "routine" review. 

They say companies like La Molisana and Garofalo provided incomplete data, screwed up paperwork," left acronyms undefined", and that sort of shit. So our government hit them with a worst case scenario duty and then applied that number to the rest of the group by association.

So because two companies allegedly had messy homework, we are now flirting with pricing an entire category of pasta out of the country. That is the level of logic we are working with.

Tell me again how this is a serious country?

Let me say this before someone jumps in with, "Bro, pasta is pasta." No, it is not. You couldn't be more wrong. Especially in this country where food manufacturers cut every single corner imagineable to feed us poison. 

Most of the brands getting hammered here specialize in "bronze-cut pasta". 

That is not a marketing buzzword. That is a completely different experience. 

The dough gets pushed through bronze dies so the surface comes out rough and almost gritty, like fine sandpaper. 

That rough texture is exactly why the sauce sticks to it instead of sliding off like it is on a Slip N Slide. 

The pasta water turns extra starchy, so when you mix a ladle of it in with your sauce, thats how you get that velvety flavor that also helps your sauce come together, You get that glossy, restaurant level coating that makes you feel like you actually know what you are doing in the kitchen.

There is a reason our people have been doing it this way for centuries. There is a method to the madness. 

Most mass-produced American pasta is extruded through Teflon-coated or plastic dies. That is cheaper and faster. (Of course)

The macaroni come out smooth and shiny, and the sauce behaves accordingly. You can see it on the plate. There is pasta. There is sauce. Usually separated in a watery mess. 

That is what is on the fucking line here. We are walking into a world where the default option is limp, smooth macaroni that taste like cardboard and bureaucracy, and the good stuff is either gone or priced like a luxury handbag.

Again, reading into this, this is how we got here- the official story is that this is all about "dumping" and "leveling the playing field." American companies like 8th Avenue Food & Provisions (Ronzoni) and Winland Foods (Prince, Mueller’s, San Giorgio) went to Commerce Dept. and said, "These Italian guys are selling pasta here at less than normal value."

Commerce picked La Molisana and Garofalo as the main test cases since they are two of the biggest exporters. Then the paperwork war started. The U.S. says the Italians sent incomplete data, used untranslated Italian terms, did not define acronyms, and ignored multiple chances to fix it. 

The Italians claim they responded like they always have for decades and that what really changed is Commerce suddenly getting way stricter with people who do not speak Beltway Bullshit, or have lobbyists on their payroll.

(Sidebar- There is also this fun little wrinkle where one of the complainants is tied to an investment group that owns other Italian pasta brands who are not getting hit by these duties and would stand to benefit if their competitors disappear from American shelves. Group is "Winland Foods" owned by a big private equity group Investindustrial. Totally normal. Nothing to see here.)

In a move so U.S. Government it hurts, nobody bothered to actually look at average store prices and see that Italian pasta in U.S. stores already costs more than American-made pasta. So if this is ineed "dumping", it is the worst executed dump of all time.

And what's really nuts abot it all is that the way these reviews work, the duties can be applied retroactively to the past year of imports for the companies involved, which means a place like Garofalo could be staring at a bill in the tens of millions just for existing during the investigation period. Which is fucking wild. So yah, f they decide the U.S. is not worth the headache anymore and tells us to screw, you can't really blame them. I get it. I do not like it, but I get it.

First they came for our pastina, and I did not speak out. Then they came for all of our bronze cut pasta, and I did not speak out. Then they came for me, and there was no one left, to speak out for me.

p.s. - throwback to the time Chef Flamm rolled gnocchi with White Sox Dave and I