# Seven Packs of Pasta in Ten, and a Mill in Puglia Trying to Stop Selling Flour > Casillo processes the raw material behind most Italian pasta and almost nobody has heard of it. Its answer to thin commodity margins is the part of the grain the industry has fed to animals for a century. - Source: Italian Insider - Canonical URL: https://italianinsider.net/en/article/casillo-altograno-wheat-germ - Author: Elena Moretti - Section: Business - Other edition: https://italianinsider.net/article/casillo-altograno-wheat-germ - Published: 2026-08-18T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-18T15:00:00.000Z - Tags: Casillo, Wheat, Food industry, Puglia --- Take ten packets of pasta off any Italian supermarket shelf. Seven of them, says Francesco Casillo, contain raw material his company processed. The name on the packaging belongs to the big pasta makers. Upstream, very often, sits Casillo Spa Società Benefit, run from its headquarters in Corato, in the province of Bari. It is the largest Italian milling group, one of the world's biggest processors of durum wheat and among the main grain trading operators in Italy and in Europe, with turnover of 1,5 billion euros that the consumer almost never sees. The company is somewhat in the shadows, its president and chief executive concedes, but behind a lot of the pasta and baked goods that reach the table, it is there. The story starts in 1958, when Francesco's father Vincenzo took charge of a small mill in Corato. It is also the story of Puglia, where companies at the time grew up in the villages around small durum wheat mills. From those first grains came the rest: other mills absorbed, leadership in soft wheat as well, where Casillo says the group now mills more than anyone in Italy, and then trading. Buying and selling grain worldwide is the company's other identity, born from purchasing for its own mills and then specialising in resale, almost always to government bodies or to other millers. Trading, though, is a business of unstable margins that lives on price swings. For at least five years, Casillo says, the group has invested heavily in innovation and in brand, with the aim of becoming an indispensable partner in creating products rather than a supplier of undifferentiated ones. Getting away from commodity logic meant looking at the part of the grain the industry throws away. A conventional mill buys wheat, grinds it and gets two things: the flour that goes to the pasta maker or the baker, and bran, which goes into animal feed. The most nutritious part of the kernel, the germ and the layers rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, has gone into animal feed for more than a century, because its fats turn rancid quickly and would ruin the shelf life of the flour. Casillo says the group inverted that, converting the mill from a producer of flour and bran into a producer of proteins, fibres, starches and fats, turning it almost into a biorefinery. The result is called Altograno. It cost tens and tens of millions and years of research with several universities, on a circular process that is now patented. By breaking the kernel down and putting it back together, the company produces a flour that it says contains more protein, more fibre and fewer carbohydrates than a traditional one, without the historic drawback of wholemeal products, where, as Casillo puts it, the consumer tastes cardboard and wood. He believes he has created a new product category, something that is neither traditional refined flour nor wholemeal and is difficult even to describe. That claim is worth handling carefully, because flours enriched with wheat germ have existed for years. A wheat kernel has three parts: the endosperm, the bran and the germ, which makes up only 2 to 3 percent of the weight but holds most of the nutrition. The problem with germ, specialists say, is that once you break it its oils go rancid within weeks in contact with air. Germ flours have therefore been compromises, either short lived artisan products to be used at once, or made with toasted germ, which degrades the qualities you wanted in the first place. The Casillo answer is written on the label in three words: de oiled wheat germ. Rather than treating the germ, the company removes the oil, which is precisely the part that goes rancid. What is left is a more stable concentrate of protein and fibre, reintroduced into the flour or semolina at 25 percent in the pasta blend and 30 percent in the blend for cakes and biscuits. The technical sheets claim a flour that keeps for twelve months like any other, with reduced fat and considerably more protein and fibre. The extracted oil is not discarded either. It becomes wheat germ oil, rich in vitamin E, and a business in its own right. That is the biorefinery idea in practice, with every fraction of the kernel finding a use. Casillo does not hide behind modesty. He compares the innovation to Nutella, which changed habits when it was invented, and to Red Bull, which created energy drinks out of nothing, with the crucial difference that those are finished foods while Altograno remains an ingredient, a base for pasta, bread, biscuits and taralli. Where a consumer actually finds it is a narrower question. Four blends, for pasta, bread, pizza and cakes, are sold on the Molino Casillo online shop. The list of partner supermarkets is not long. More numerous are the bakeries across Italy working with it. At Pane e Pazienza in Rome, on the Portuense, the verdict is brisk: good flour, few carbohydrates, rich in fibre and protein, used there for bread, only for ciabattine. Whether it does what the company says is a separate matter, and the science is at an early stage. A first study by the University of Bari, run with the Casillo group, tested an Altograno pasta for controlling cholesterol and metabolic alterations in a specific group of patients. The more awaited verdict, a study by a respected Italian research centre led by a gastroenterology specialist, is due in December. The underlying idea is plausible, since raising fibre and protein and cutting carbohydrates can improve a food's nutritional profile. Establishing whether that produces measurable clinical benefit needs human trials, and those are still running. The commercial path is clearer than the clinical one. Like a component part, Altograno is meant to slot into other companies' products and improve them. Garofalo's Strapasta is made with it, and in April the group signed an alliance with Puratos Italia, the local arm of the Belgian giant with 3,7 billion in global revenue that supplies bakery ingredients to bakers and pastry shops. The Italian market for baking flour is worth between 1,3 and 2 billion euros and is broadly static, which means growth can only come from special flours, and that is the space Altograno is aiming at. If the plan holds, Casillo says, these innovations will account for 50 percent of the group's margin by 2030, half its profitability resting on products that did not exist a few years ago. The final piece is the Agrifood Hub in Corato, a 15 million euro investment opening in September in a restored old mill with the Politecnico di Bari, combining a research centre with pilot plants, a startup incubator and training academies, open, he says, to competitors as well. --- Originally published by Italian Insider. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://italianinsider.net/en/article/casillo-altograno-wheat-germ.