Which Shape of Pasta is the Cheapest?

July 2, 2008 5:52 AM

Which Shape of Pasta is the Cheapest?

I've noticed in the supermarket, different shapes of pasta are different prices, now im sure there might be a slight cost difference in producing pasta of a certian shape. But sometimes more than double is alot more than I expected.

What Pasta shape is the cheapest to produce and which is the cheapest to buy? and why?

Tesco Fusilli Pasta Twists (£1.56/kg)
Tesco Penne Pasta Quills (£1.24/kg)
Tesco Linguine Pasta (£1.10/kg)
Tesco Short Spaghetti (£0.90/kg)
Tesco Macaroni (£1.38/kg)
Tesco Tagliatelle (£1.84/kg)


I was reading an article on the standard cost of living in the UK that showed the same thing.

Here

It puts average cost of living at £13,400 (*beyond stupid i know)

Report
however this is not about that.. its about the price index the report used. Simlar to the Retail Price index used for inflation.

It shows

Pasta, dried (fusilli) was 78p

Pasta, dried (spaghetti) was 41p

posted by complience to food & drink (14 comments total)

If you assume the basic ingredients of the pasta are the same (does anyone know offhand if this is true for standard supermarket brands?) then the cheapest to produce should be the one's requiring the least processing. I would guess this would be lasagne sheets as they require less shaping/cutting. I suppose this might be mitigated by the need to produce sheets of particular thinness which might require more expensive process oversight or such, or by the differences in the cost of packaging for such sheets. I'd be surprised if you can find a breakdown of mass production costs for different pasta shapes - its not the kind of information companies give out.
posted by biffa at 5:59 AM on July 2

Cheapest to buy is very easy to figure out.. just calculate the price per gram.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:02 AM on July 2

On an industrial scale, they'll just use pasta extruders to made the different shapes, but one would imagine that spaghetti is the cheapest to make, pack and transport (since there's not much waste space in the packaging, nor the drying process.)

Out of interest, why is 13,400 quid beyond stupid?
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:05 AM on July 2

long skinny pasta can be package in a smaller volume per weight. since the cost of the packaging itself (plus shipping, etc.) is probably as much as the cost of the actual pasta, i'm guessing shape can make a big difference to the cost.
posted by snofoam at 6:05 AM on July 2

can be packaged
posted by snofoam at 6:05 AM on July 2

Around here (in the US), we don't have that much variation in prices in the basic pasta. All the ones in your list would be sold in a 16 oz box for the same price. So there are a lot of "cheapest to buy".

More expensive is lasagna and tri-color or spinach pastas, although often they still keep the price constant but make the box smaller.
posted by smackfu at 6:07 AM on July 2

I totally forgot what the hell it is called, but I would assume the "cheapest" pasta to produce is the "variety" one, which is basically comprised of broken lasagna pieces, and a hodgpodge of other irregular specialty pasta pieces.... I don't know if Ronzoni or other supermarket name brand pasta companies have them but I know that some of the other non-boxed brands do have this. (Of course it was the same price as the others, but go figure.)


That said, I doubt that it really costs any more money to shape different pastas. Unless they're very fragile and complicated, and susceptible to breaking during packaging or parcooking, I can't see how any particular shape would cost more to make. everything is done by machine, and the only different cost I can see would be in the shape of the mold, which would be a one time cost. I'm not an expert on mass production of pasta, though, so I could be completely off base here.
posted by Debaser626 at 6:10 AM on July 2

WOW Tesco is pricey!!

At Sainsburys I pay $£0.19 for 500g of pasta "shapes", £0.23 for 500g of spaghetti and £0.32 for 250g of Lasagna sheets. These are all from their "basics" or generic range. I cook my own sauce, and find the quality / cost of pasta irrelevant to the mean overall.

In terms of overall cost of living, Mrs Mutant and I live in Whitechapel, Zone 2, postal code E1 and it currently (I run a very detailed budget) costs us £10,122 a year to live. So since the BBC article says the cost of living for two should be $240.61 / week, or £12,511 a year this post made my day (I'm frugal, you see). But the BBCs footnote says this figure "doesn't include housing". Curious.

In any case, the top three contributors are Food (£4,160 a year, lots of veggies and fruit), Mortgage (£3,660 a year, currently financed at 4.99% fixed but we have to remortgage in October and I'm inclined to just pay it off) and council tax (£761 a year, Band B property valuation).

If you're thinking of stocking up on pasta - DO IT. In the UK pasta prices for what I purchase haven't risen for maybe six months. We've got about twenty kils of pasta stored away. We got 24 kilos rice purchased before prices spiked a few weeks ago. I haven't seen any price rises for honey in the last year (£0.61 for a 340g jar of Sainsburys Basics range) and I'm aggressively stockpiling as that price is gonna skyrocket when they finally do raise it.

Prices ain't going down in the near term, so if you've got the cash and the storage space y're better off purchasing now.
posted by Mutant at 6:33 AM on July 2

I wonder for how many people is it feasible to store 20 kilos of rice, pasta, honey, nylons and c.?
posted by oxford blue at 7:56 AM on July 2

@oxford blue: Only for those people who have bought/rent homes with space in excess of their non-stockpiling needs. If your mortgage pays for empty space, savings through stockpiling might offset part (or all) of the costs other otherwise 'wasted' (paid for yet unoccupied) space.

Me, I'd rather have lower housing costs...
posted by onshi at 10:59 AM on July 2

As to the original question, the different costs may not reflect the manufacturing costs of each style of pasta so much as the volume of each that the particular retailer sells. It is often the case that the less often something is bought, the higher the price at retail. This may be due to less-favourable terms from manufacturers or distributors for smaller quantities at wholesale.
posted by onshi at 11:02 AM on July 2

All things being equal (i.e. disregarding the fact that some pasta is actually made with higher quality ingredients than others), I suspect that the pricing variance for different shapes of pasta may be an example of price discimination. In other words, customers who buy pasta because it's a cheap meal can buy inexpensive spaghetti, while those who care about "quality" over price can choose rigatoni and farfalle instead.
posted by hot soup girl at 1:54 PM on July 2

There is price discrimination happening, but I think it's not just about picky versus non-picky customers - spagetti, for instance, so no easier to produce than linguini. I think it is because certain shapes of pasta are perceived as higher status than other shapes. You can see this in what is available in what brands, as well. Where I lived in Britain, if you wanted to buy the cheapest store brand you had no choice but spagetti - for any other shapes, you had to buy premium brands. Tescos may just be doing the same kind of price discrimination themselves - realising there is a class/cultural premium to certain kinds of pasta (which are seen to be more authentically Italian and less working class than spagetti).

I think this is more extreme in Britain than many places in the United States and Canada, because we just have a much higher Italian-immigrant population. I remember finding pasta in general in Britain less common and more expensive than in North America (though most other staples are actually about the same price, and some very British foods - like sausages or meat pies - cheaper). Where I now live in the US, all pasta is sold by weight and for the same price/weight; price differences are only between brand and wholewheat/not - not by shape.

That said, when I was growing up in Canada (in a city with many Italian-immigrants), there were pastas which were more associated with poor/working class culture (spagetti, macaroni, screws), and fancier, more Italian seeming pastas - linguini, fetticine, fusilli instead of rotini (aka screws). I ate spagetti or macaroni a couple of times a week when growing up, but never had linguini (which I now love) until I was an adult, and working in a restaurant that served it. To this day, I have never eaten the most expensive pasta you noted in your original post (Tagliatelle (£1.84/kg).
posted by jb at 9:36 PM on July 2

Although you didn't ask about it specifically, I think you should take time-to-cook into account when figuring your price. I'm in the US, so Angel Hair (very thin spaghetti shaped pasta) that cooks in 3-4 minutes is significantly cheaper prepared than is dried fetuccini, which can take up to 14 minutes to cook. They are the same price on the store shelf.
posted by OmieWise at 12:58 PM on July 7