Barilla has opened a school just outside Parma. This is not a university lecture hall named after the company thanks to a donation, or a conference room in a corporate HQ, but a real academy devoted to the study of one subject: basil. It’s easy to laugh at, until you hear the numbers: +17%. That’s how much pesto sales grew between 2023 and 2024. People all over the world can’t seem to get enough of the stuff — that vivid green, the oil, the pine nuts, the comfort in a jar. Pesto isn’t just a sauce anymore. It’s nostalgia with shelf life. It’s Italy in a spoonful. So, instead of doubling down on factories and automation, Barilla turned back to the fields.
All of the basil in Barilla’s pesto is grown in Italy, in a tightly monitored supply chain with ISCC–plus certification. There’s even a manifesto of sorts — the Barilla Basil Charter — full of standards, crop rotation cycles, audits, biodiversity goals. But here’s the real shift: they’re not just documenting the process, they’re teaching it. Investing in the people who grow things. Not just once, not with a manual, but with time, tools, and actual classes. That’s where the academy comes in. Not in some ivory tower, but right in the fields of Emilia-Romagna, created with Dinamica (a training organization that works in food agriculture) and Open Fields, an agricultural consulting firm.
The program kicked off in January: seven lessons, each hands-on, focused, deeply rooted in practice. They talk about crop diseases, soil health, and — maybe unexpectedly — data. Agriculture 4.0, as they call it. Predictive models. Decision support systems. Algorithms, yes — but grounded in dirt. Because basil depends on timing, signals, a pace you can’t rush. Simone Bernardi, who runs Agricola Bernardi, remembers when all this tech sounded like science fiction. “Now it’s part of our routine”, he says. “It saves time, but mostly, it makes the product better. And we’re the first link in the chain. We can’t just guess anymore”. Alessia Bonati, from La Felina farm, speaks from another angle — younger, female, in a still largely male space. “Agriculture isn’t what it was”, she says. “You don’t erase tradition. You update it. Innovation can be a kind of respect — for the land, for those who work it, and for those who’ll eat the result”.
These days, Barilla doesn’t just sell pesto. It sells a process. Basil grown with care, with an eye on carbon footprint, biodiversity, traceability. Since June 2023, every jar of Genovese Pesto comes with a QR code, which can be scanned to trace the product from seed to jar – a move that plays up the company’s marketability with a sincere effort at offering the consumer peace of mind. And as of July 2024, that transparency goes live in 14 more countries. Even the packaging is changing. The Half Flint Jar — that’s its name — is made with up to 65% recycled glass and has already replaced 43 million traditional containers. Its environmental certification shows a 28% drop in emissions compared to standard jars, with no extra energy spent.
So no, the Basil Academy isn’t a marketing stunt. It’s a project rooted in knowledge. A way to build skills, update techniques, and start conversations between the people who grow and the people who create. At a time when “sustainability” risks becoming a background buzzword, Barilla is trying to bring it back to ground level — where things grow. Where people learn. Where responsibility is shared.
