Dustin Moffitt joined Barilla’s pasta plant in Ames, Iowa, as a production operator in 2002. The Iowa native then worked his way through jobs as a processing technologist, mill manager, and production manager before becoming plant director. “I’ve literally grown up with this plant,” Moffitt told the Ames Regional Economic Alliance. “What’s made Barilla special to me is the opportunity to keep learning, keep improving, and work with people who genuinely care about what they do. The team here in Ames is world-class.”
The plant has grown up, too. Barilla, a family-owned Italian food company whose story began with a small shop in Parma in 1877, opened the Ames plant in 1998 as its first U.S. factory. Today, Ames is the only Barilla location in the United States that mills wheat and makes pasta under one roof. The 125-acre site employs roughly 260 people, processes more than 700 tons of wheat a day, and turns out about 1.2 million boxes of pasta a day.
