Our Pasta Lab Results, Published in Full

Every harvest of my pasta goes to an accredited laboratory in Minneapolis, and this page is the result, printed as it came back. Three pastas, more than thirty measurements each, and the full reports behind every claim on my label. As far as I can tell, no other pasta brand publishes a panel like this at all.

Why I am publishing this

Every pasta company says its product is tested. Almost none of them will show you the report.

I went looking at what my competitors publish before I built this page. Jovial, Bionaturae, DeLallo, Barilla, Eden, Sfoglini, Rustichella, Sgambaro, and several others. Two of them publish contaminant certification, which is a real and useful document and a different one from this. None of them publishes a full composition panel: ash, fibre split into its fractions, a complete mineral suite, individual sugars, vitamins.

So here is mine: the whole report, every analyte, exactly as the laboratory issued it.

You should hold every brand to this, including me. If a company will not show you the report, the word "tested" is doing no work.

Who did the testing, and what the footnotes mean

All testing was done by Medallion Labs, 9000 Plymouth Avenue North, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Medallion is accredited by A2LA to ISO/IEC 17025, certificates 2769.01 and 2769.02. I am the submitting customer on every report, which means these are first-party tests: I paid for them and I chose what to run.

The numbers, per 100 grams

As tested, on the dry pasta as sold. A dash means the test was not run on that sample.

Total polyphenols. Measured at 1891 mg/kg on the Tumminìa and 1658 on the Perciasacchi, and I am making no claim from it. There is no Daily Value for polyphenols, so "rich in" has nothing to be rich against; the method sits outside the lab's accreditation scope; and the durum was never tested at all. The number is in the table because it is in the report.

What my pasta is a good source of

Nutrient claims in the United States work on tiers. A food is a good source of a nutrient at 10 to 19% of the Daily Value in a serving, and high in or an excellent source at 20% or more. Below is what each pasta declares, per serving.

Every one of those is an absolute statement about my own pasta, taken from its Nutrition Facts panel. None of them is a comparison to anyone else's product, and I do not make comparative nutrient claims.

The one number that proves the mill

Ash is what is left when you burn a flour: the mineral fraction, which sits mostly in the bran and the germ. It is the standard way a miller checks how much of the grain survived, because you cannot fake it with an ingredient list.

Measured on a dry basis, so the moisture differences do not distort it:

The Durum Busiate at 0.901% is refined semola, and its ingredient line says so. The Tumminìa at 1.951% and the Perciasacchi at 1.612% are wholemeal, and USDA's reference figure for whole-grain wheat flour is 1.77%. That is the mill doing what a stone mill does: the bran and the germ go through into the flour instead of out through a sieve.

This is a process fact, not a nutrition claim, which is exactly why I trust it more than the rest of the page. It is also the number most likely to reproduce next harvest, because it reflects how the grain was milled rather than how the weather went.

One honest footnote. Italian law defines pasta di semola integrale by an ash band of 1.40 to 1.80% on a dry basis. The Perciasacchi at 1.612% sits inside it. The Tumminìa at 1.951% sits above it, so I do not attach the Italian legal category to that one, even though the direction is the flattering one.

The folic acid result

This is the strongest single thing in the file and it is a measurement of an absence.

If a pasta is labelled enriched, 21 CFR 139.115 tells the manufacturer exactly how much synthetic folic acid to add: 198 to 265 micrograms per 100 grams. Mine is not enriched, so nothing is added. Rather than simply assert that, I had it measured by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, which can distinguish synthetic folic acid from the folates that occur in the grain.

The Durum Busiate came back below the limit of detection, under 10 micrograms per 100 grams. In the 2024 harvest and again in 2025.

Two things I will not do with that result. I will not call it zero: "below 10" is a detection limit, not a measured absence, and those are different statements. And I will not stretch it across the line: the Tumminìa and the Perciasacchi have never had the folic acid speciation run, so on those two the honest form is the recipe fact, no folic acid is added, which needs no assay. I am running the same test on both at the next harvest.

If you want the background on why American pasta carries synthetic folic acid at all, and what the standard of identity actually requires, I wrote that up in why American pasta is enriched. The shorter versions: enriched versus non-enriched pasta, and, because the two words get used as if they mean the same thing, folate versus folic acid.

Questions about these reports

Can I see the actual PDFs?

Yes. Email me and I will send the reports as the lab issued them, including the revision history. Nothing on this page has been retyped in a way that changes a value; every figure here was checked back against the report text.

Why do some of your numbers differ from the Nutrition Facts panel on the bag?

Panels are rounded to the increments the regulation requires, and they are calculated on a 56 gram serving. The claim table above uses the 55 gram reference amount that the threshold rules are based on. Where the bag and this page disagree, this page has the unrounded figure and the bag has the legally formatted one.

Does more minerals mean it is better for me?

That is not a question this page can answer. These are compositional measurements of a food. Nobody has run a study on what my pasta does in a person, and I would not build a health claim on a mineral panel even if the numbers were flattering, which several of them are not.

The question people actually want answered is a different one, and I could not answer that one either. I laid out the six explanations people give for feeling fine on pasta in Italy, and why not one of them is settled.

Disclaimer: the content in this blog is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as professional, medical advice.

The three pastas on this page

Durum Busiate, refined Sicilian durum semola. Tumminìa and Perciasacchi, both wholemeal Sicilian landraces, stone ground. All three organic and certified by CCPB, slow dried, bronze die cut, one ingredient on the bag, non-enriched.

If you want the history behind those three grains, and what a century of plant breeding changed about them, that is what plant breeding actually changed about wheat, and the ancient grains of Sicily covers where the landraces come from.

Numbers are one kind of evidence and a person is another. One customer wrote up hers, twenty years gluten free before she tried an ancient grain pasta. That is her account of her own experience, not a result these reports predict for anyone else.

I'm not a doctor. This is my food and my story. Talk to your doctor, and read your labels.