Equipment, building, utilities, drying, yield and timeline — planning guidance from a manufacturer with 42 lines installed in 18 countries.
What to plan before you buy a line — product mix, capacity, building, utilities, drying, yield and timeline. The figures below come from our own commissioning records: 42 pasta lines installed in 18 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa, with our first installation in the Americas currently underway in Cuba.
Your product decision determines the entire line configuration, so make it first.
| Product | Typical formats | Line type |
|---|---|---|
| Short-cut pasta | Penne, fusilli, elbow macaroni | Short-cut line |
| Long-cut pasta | Spaghetti, linguine | Long-cut line |
| Couscous | Traditional and industrial couscous | Couscous line |
Most new factories start with a short-cut line. The drying process is simpler, the building requirement is smaller, and a single line covers a wide range of formats through die changes alone. Long-cut is usually added in year two or three, once the brand has distribution.
In North and West Africa and across the Gulf, short-cut “macaroni” formats dominate first purchases. In Central Asia and Türkiye, plants more often start with both.
Capacity drives everything downstream: building size, connected power, silo volume, packaging speed, working capital.
The common mistake is sizing for today's sales. Size for month eighteen. Adding capacity later almost always costs more than the initial difference, because the building, the utilities and the packaging hall have to be reworked as well.
A second consideration: dryer capacity must match press capacity. A dryer sized below the press creates a permanent bottleneck that no amount of operational skill can recover.
A pasta line is not a machine you place in a corner. It is a process that runs the length of a hall. These are the figures to give your architect before anything else is drawn:
| Line capacity | Length | Width (incl. auxiliary equipment) | Ceiling height | Floor area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 kg/h | 50 m | 14 m | 8 m | approx. 700 m² |
| 1,000 kg/h | 70 m | 14 m | 9 m | approx. 980 m² |
These areas cover the production line and its auxiliary equipment. Raw material intake, semolina silos and finished-goods warehousing are additional and depend on how much stock your market forces you to hold.
Utility requirements for a 1,000 kg/h line:
| Utility | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Electrical supply | 220/400 V, 50 Hz |
| Average operating load | approx. 150 kW |
| Compressed air | 6–10 bar |
| Hot water circuit | 130 °C |
| Chilled water circuit | max. 18 °C |
| Process water | potable, chloride below 30 ppm, 1.5–2 bar |
| Ambient conditions | 22–40 °C, relative humidity below 60 % |
| Electrical panel room | below 30 °C |
Two points that are easy to miss at the planning stage.
The hot and chilled water circuits are part of the process, not building services. The drying section needs hot water at 130 °C and the extrusion head needs chilled water below 18 °C. On our lines the boiler, the chiller, the compressor and the water softening unit are all inside the supply scope, so they are not separate procurement exercises. This is worth confirming explicitly with any supplier — a boiler or chiller sourced separately can add months to a project and is a common reason two quotations look far apart.
The building has to handle the air balance. Drying pushes humid air out continuously, and the hall needs ventilation and climate control sized to replace it while holding the ambient conditions above. This is the buyer's scope in almost every contract, including ours, and it is the item most often left out of a project budget.
Plan raw-material intake, production flow and hygiene zoning (raw / process / packing) at the drawing stage, not after the steel is up.
Semolina is the largest recurring cost in a pasta plant, and its quality is not constant. It varies between harvests, between mills, and sometimes between deliveries from the same mill.
Durum semolina produces premium dry pasta with the characteristic amber colour and bite. Soft wheat flour and blends serve price-sensitive markets, which covers a large part of Africa and South Asia.
A well-designed line handles both, but the drying programme has to adapt. Ask your supplier directly whether the line can hold its drying curve across different raw material qualities — and secure at least two supply sources before you commission.
These are the raw material values our lines are specified against. Use them as a checklist when you qualify a mill:
| Parameter | Durum semolina | Soft wheat flour |
|---|---|---|
| Moisture | max. 14.5 % | max. 14.5 % |
| Ash content | max. 0.9 % | max. 0.55 % |
| Protein | 11–14 % | from 9 % |
Particle distribution matters as much as protein. For durum semolina, nothing above 500 µm, with the bulk of the material between 150 and 425 µm. Oversized particles do not hydrate at the same rate as the rest of the batch, and the result appears at the end of the dryer as white specks and uneven colour.
If your recipe uses more than 60 % soft wheat flour, the flour should also be checked on a Chopin alveograph, with W around 180–200 and P/L around 0.5–0.6.
An industrial pasta line consists of six equipment groups. If a quotation is missing one of them, the difference will appear later as an unbudgeted cost.
Flour handling and dosing — semolina silos, pneumatic transfer, automatic sifting and dosing.
Mixing and extrusion — vacuum mixer (removing air is what gives dry pasta its colour and translucency), extrusion press, bronze or Teflon dies, automatic die washing.
Shaping — a rotating cutter at the die face for short-cut; a spreader hanging strands on sticks for long-cut. One die set per format.
Drying — pre-dryer and multi-zone main dryer with controlled temperature and humidity, followed by a stabilising and cooling section.
Storage and packaging — product silos with first-in-first-out discharge, weighers, vertical form-fill-seal machines, secondary packaging.
Automation and utilities — PLC control with recipe management and drying-curve supervision, compressed air, steam, water treatment.
Most quality complaints in a new plant — colour variation, micro-cracking, breakage in the bag — trace back to the drying curve rather than the extruder. Extrusion is comparatively forgiving. Drying is not.
The difficulty is that drying has to stay correct while the raw material moves underneath it. Semolina protein and moisture change between deliveries, and a drying programme that was right last month can be wrong this month. A line that holds its curve under that variation is the difference between a plant that runs and a plant that argues with its customers.
A useful question for any supplier: what happens to your drying curve when protein content drops by one point mid-batch? The answer tells you whether the control system is real or decorative.
Across the full cycle, roughly 15 to 16 percentage points of moisture are removed from the product, ending at a maximum of 12.5 % in the finished pasta. That happens in three controlled stages, and each one has a different job:
The third stage is the one buyers underestimate. Pasta that leaves the dryer at the correct average moisture but with the moisture unevenly distributed inside the piece will crack days later, in the warehouse or in the customer's shop. Stabilising is what prevents that, and a line without a proper stabilising section will produce breakage complaints no operator can fix.
For reference, the dryer on a 1,000 kg/h short-cut line is an 11-tier unit, 13.2 m long, with a 1,900 mm belt width. When you compare offers, compare tier count and belt area rather than headline capacity — that is where drying time per kilogram actually comes from.
This is worth checking carefully, because it is a recurring cost, not a one-off.
Short-cut production generates no process waste. Trimmings from the cutter return directly to the process.
Long-cut production has two trim points, and neither has to become a loss.
The first happens at the start of the drying journey, when the fresh strands are laid over the sticks and the hanging ends are trimmed to length. This material goes straight back to the main mixing tank and into production — it never leaves the process.
The second happens at the final trimming after drying, where roughly 2–3 cm remains on the stick hangers, depending on the pack length the customer wants. On our lines this material can optionally be routed back into the raw material feed through a recycling system, which brings effective waste close to zero.
When you evaluate a long-cut line, ask about both points separately. A supplier who only discusses the second one has not thought about the first.
A modern line is designed to run with a small shift team. Recipe management, drying-curve control and production reporting sit in one supervisory system, so the plant does not depend on a single experienced operator being present.
What matters more than headcount is training depth. Commissioning should include operator training on site, and the supplier should still answer the phone in year three. Our installations include on-site commissioning and training, a 24-month warranty, and 24/7 remote support in English, French, Arabic, German and Russian.
Requirements are market-specific, and they take longer than most investors expect. Start them in parallel with manufacturing, not after delivery.
Your machinery supplier should provide the full technical file for the equipment. Everything relating to the food business itself — licence, hygiene approval, product registration — remains the operator's responsibility.
| Phase | Duration |
|---|---|
| Engineering, manufacturing and delivery | 4–8 months |
| Installation and commissioning on site | 3–4 months |
| Order to first commercial production | 7–12 months |
These are typical ranges. Contractual lead times are quoted per project and are usually longer, because a manufacturer with several lines in production at the same time has to protect the delivery date against its own workload. Ask for the contractual figure, not the marketing figure, and check what triggers the clock — on most contracts, including ours, manufacturing time starts from receipt of the first payment, not from signature.
The single most effective way to compress the schedule is to run building works in parallel with machine manufacturing rather than sequentially. Projects that wait for the equipment to arrive before starting construction routinely lose three to four months.
Commissioning itself follows a fixed sequence, and it is worth knowing before you plan your launch: dry testing without product, then production testing to set recipes and drying curves, then a capacity and performance test on an agreed product format. Only after that test is signed off does day-to-day operation pass to your team. Budget time for it — this is not a formality.
We do not publish price lists, because a pasta line is configured rather than bought off a shelf, and a number without a scope attached is meaningless. What is useful is knowing what actually moves the figure:
That last point is where quotations diverge most. Two offers that look far apart often describe different scopes entirely. We cover how to read and compare quotations, and the full supply-scope checklist, in our pasta production line cost guide.
On financing: pasta line projects are frequently supported through export credit arrangements, and Turkish-manufactured equipment is eligible for Turkish export credit programmes. We can point buyers toward the relevant route as part of project discussions.
Where these figures come from. The dimensions, loads, timelines and yield figures in this guide are taken from Talia Makina's own commissioning records — 42 pasta lines installed in 18 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa, with a further installation underway in Cuba. Every reference plant listed on our references page can be visited by appointment.
We will come back with a line layout and a written scope, not just a price.
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