Barilla, the 140-year-old Italian family-owned food company, celebrated expansion of its pasta plant and integrated durum mill located in Ames, Iowa. The company installed two additional processing and packaging lines, a rail-yard expansion and six new silos to store wheat. This expansion brings the facility's production capacity to 200,000 metric tons of dry pasta per year.

The Barilla Ames facility now has 214 employees and eight production lines able to produce 200,000 metric tons of pasta annually. This expansion follows a recent addition in 2015, which brought 23 jobs and two new production lines for gluten-free pasta. Barilla received support from local and state government to secure tax incentives for both projects.