Sfoglini Is on a Mission to Make the Best American Pasta. There’s Just One Problem

Born at the tail end of the last recession, Sfoglini is navigating the twists and turns of the current economy amid the founder’s steadfast commitment to doing things the hard way. 

This story originally appeared in Inc. in Feburary.

Whole Grain Reginetti exiting the pre-dryer where the outside of the pasta is flash dried to hold its unique ruffled shape. Photo: Nathan Bajar

When Scott Ketchum set out to create American-made, premium pasta, he had no idea just how challenging it would be. 

Ketchum and his friend, co-founder Steve Gonzalez, came up with the idea during an economic downturn. In 2012, Ketchum was working as a creative director at a design agency and was ready for a change. Gonzalez, who had worked as a chef at celebrated Italian kitchens such as Vetri in Philadelphia and Roberta’s, Hearth, and Frankies Spuntino in New York City, had recently moved back to the Big Apple after opening a pizza place in Philadelphia. It was his dream to open a small restaurant featuring hand-made pastas. He asked Ketchum to help him with his logo and business plan.

“But in 2012, we were in an economic slowdown, and the cost of opening a restaurant in New York City was astronomical,” Ketchum says. That’s when they decided to start a business together making wholesale pasta. At the time, there wasn’t any American-made premium-quality pasta. They each had some savings—$30,000 total—and with that, they bought a $10,000 pasta extruder and rented a 700-square-foot space in the old Pfizer plant in Brooklyn, which other food makers were starting to populate.  

“We thought, ‘All right, this is where we’re gonna give it a shot,’” Ketchum recalls. They christened their new company Sfoglini, inspired by the tradition of the sfogline, the women in Emilia-Romagna who have mastered the art of making pasta by hand. They made their pastas with imported organic Italian durum, which many consider to be the best flour for pasta. Their facility became a pasta lab of sorts, where they could tinker with new shapes and types of wheat. Initially, they sold fresh pasta to Tom Colicchio’s restaurants, the Mandarin Oriental, the Peninsula, and the St. Regis. But as they grew, things got more complicated.

Scott Ketchum, CEO of Sfoglini

The old Pfizer building was ideal for many reasons—it had a full loading dock, freight elevators, and a community of other food makers. To save money, the duo rigged together a pasta dryer from an old refrigerator. “We built a walk-in in one of those Pfizer rooms and worked with a construction team on adding heating and humidifying elements,” says Ketchum. Pasta drying is an art, but amazingly it worked. “We were able to start the business that way. But it was too risky, we realized,” he says. (Pasta needs to dry evenly, otherwise you’ll get breaking in the pasta or it’ll be too wet at the ends.) After nearly three years, they finally invested in a pricey Italian-made pasta drier. 

In 2018, they outgrew their space and moved to a 37,000-square foot building in West Coxsackie in New York’s Hudson Valley. Eventually, they were turning out over a dozen types of pasta, including unusual flavors like Kale Penne and Turmeric Reginetti—both of which won Good Food Awards—and the viral hit Cascatelli, a collaboration with two-time James Beard-award winning podcaster Dan Pashman. 

They also started bringing unique shapes of pasta that had disappeared over the decades back to the U.S. marketplace—shapes like Spaccatelli, Quattrotini, Vesuvio, Zucca, and Lumache. They even began making whole-grain pastas, sourcing American-grown wheat, einkorn, and rye from Farmer Ground Mill in upstate New York. 

The difference between truly stellar pasta and mediocre pasta are bronze die machines, which produce a finished pasta with a porous texture that makes it absorb sauces more effectively—creating what Ketchum calls a “tooth-sinkability.” (At this point, most industrial-sized pasta companies use Teflon dies, which creates a smooth-surfaced pasta that sauce slides right off.)  

A bronze die or mold that the flour mixture goes through to get its shape. Photo: Nathan Bajar

This sets Sfoglini apart from other U.S. pasta companies: They use custom-made bronze die machines. The reason most companies opt for Teflon over bronze has to do with maintenance. “Bronze dies make a lot of dust from the dough and can be a nightmare to clean and take care of,” says Chris Maldari, co-owner of D. Maldari & Sons, a die-maker formerly based in Brooklyn.

Creating machinery to make intricate, lesser-known pasta shapes—which Sfoglini set out to feature—is a laborious process. For each pasta shape, new perforated metal plates are created—and re-created. (Trials are done to see if the pasta shape holds up during the boiling process.) The company also uses a “slower dry” method for its pasta—nine to 10 hours—which preserves nutrition and flavor. Now that the company has eight Italian-made driers, it is able to make 10,000 pounds a day. 

As a result, Sfoglini sits squarely in the “mid-tier” of U.S. pasta manufacturers—not big enough to compete with companies like Winland Foods or Philadelphia Macaroni Company (which make millions of pounds of pasta per week), but bigger than some artisanal producers, which produce half as much as Sfoglini.

Being a mid-sized producer turned out to be excellent for business. In 2018, in front of a live audience in New York City’s Lower East Side, food podcaster Dan Pashman of The Sporkful made a controversial proclamation: “spaghetti sucks!” In the first episode of his series “Mission ImPASTAble,” he said that there were three things each pasta shape should have: forkability (how easy it is to get the pasta on your fork), sauceability (how readily sauce adheres to the shape), and the aforementioned tooth-sinkability (how satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it). At the end of that episode, he set himself a formidable challenge: He would invent a new pasta shape to meet all three of those categories. 

Roughly a year later, Ketchum got a call from Pashman. “He was having trouble getting the idea off the ground,” Ketchum says.

He also found it nearly impossible to find a U.S. pasta producer who would do a small initial minimum order and who used bronze die machines. After Pashman visited the Sfoglini headquarters, Ketchum and Gonzalez agreed to collaborate with him on his quest. Using Pashman’s sketches as inspiration, they did R&D with D. Maldari & Sons. The outcome was Cascatelli (waterfalls in Italian)—a half-tube with ridges and ruffles to capture more sauce. (Pashman owns the patent on the shape, and Sfoglini is the exclusive producer.) 

They weren’t sure if consumers would latch on to it, but on the day it launched in 2021, they sold 10,000 pounds in 20 minutes. The new pasta shape and Sfoglini and Pashman were featured on CBS Sunday Morning a couple days later. Stories in both Food & Wine and the New York Times followed. “It was everywhere!” Ketchum says. The company ended up pre-selling 350,000 pounds before workers even made another batch. Time magazine declared Cascatelli one of the Top Inventions of 2021. 

Today, Cascatelli is still a top seller at specialty food stores. Meredith Pakier, marketing manager at gourmet grocer Market Hall Foods in Oakland, California, says that Cascatelli still sells quicker than any of the other Sfoglini pastas.

Just before the pandemic, Ketchum and Gonzalez quietly partnered with De Angelis Food, an Italian firm that makes fresh pastas in Italy. (The two companies operate separately but sometimes share a booth at trade shows.) The partnership has allowed Sfoglini to lean on De Angelis’s expertise in sourcing Italian durum. A team from DeAngelis also came to West Coxsackie to help Sfoglini optimize equipment and improve efficiency on the production line. Ketchum, the CEO, still makes all business decisions. (Gonzalez ended up leaving the company in 2023 to start his own fresh pasta-making business in the Hudson Valley.)

These days, Sfoglini has annual revenue of $6 million and a lean staff of 11. Its pastas are sold at Whole Foods in the Northeast as well as specialty food stores across the country. A handful of restaurants—including JoJo by Jean-Georges and Carne Mare in New York City and Talespin Pizza in Houston—feature Sfoglini pasta on their menus. 

Though Sfoglini sources most of its grains for its whole wheat pastas from upstate New York, the majority of the company’s pasta shapes are made with organic durum wheat from Italy, which has gotten more expensive over the past year. Ketchum says the company started paying 10-percent tariffs on Italian durum in April, and that rose to 15 percent in the summer. “That hasn’t been very helpful,” he says. Because Sfoglini is already a premium-priced pasta, Ketchum says he’s been reluctant to raise prices. But soon he may have to: “I can’t afford that extra $5,000 to $10,000 bill on top of everything.”

Ketchum says he can’t source enough organic durum in the U.S. “The supply chain for organic semolina wheat here in the U.S. is pretty slim,” he says. (Semolina is the name for coarsely ground durum wheat.) 

It’s also important to Ketchum that he stick to organic ingredients—and his health-minded customer base is willing to pay more for organic. Not only that, durum requires a different type of mill than regular wheat, and there aren’t enough durum mills in the U.S., he says. 

Sfoglini also has another problem: Consumer confidence in the economy is low, which means shoppers aren’t spending as much on premium food products, says Ketchum. 

Even as his costs increase, customers seem increasingly motivated by discounts. As he weighs what to do with prices, Ketchum and his team are still looking at new products and researching new shapes. “I’m just trying to get through these tough moments,” he says. If history is any guide, the hard stuff will only make him more creative.