Are We On The Verge of a Pasta Productivity Revolution?

Wow, our second pasta post this week.*
From Slate's Moneybox:

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 15: Elizabeth Amaros stands near trays of fresh pasta at Piemonte Ravioli on June 15, 2011 in New York City.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Fresh pasta is even more delicious than dried pasta, and the ingredients you need to make it (basically flour and eggs) are cheap. So why aren't we eating it all the time? Well, it's much more efficient to make pasta in large factories and distribute it dried than to make it batch-by-batch in thousands of different restaurants.

Nick Czap's profile of pasta machine importer Emilio Mitidieri makes it clear that getting your restaurant kitchen equipped with the machines you need to make fresh pasta is a fairly complicated and expensive undertaking. The task seems to be complicated by the small-firm nature of the Italian economy. Rather than there being three or four giant manufacturers of pasta machines with highly efficient global supply chains and sales and support teams around the world, restauranteurs need to work with middlemen like Mitidieri on a much more individualized basis. There seem to be a lot of potential economies of scale not happening here.

But Czap buries the lede. Way down at the end of the piece we learn that there's potentially a huge productivity revolution in the works here:

“Ninety-seven percent of the restaurant industry wouldn’t consider having a pasta machine, because they buy prepared pasta, or they seem intimidated by the machine,” he said, “but they all have a Hobart,” referring to the burly commercial mixer.

Sensing an untapped market, Mr. Mitidieri enlisted a machinist in Italy to develop a compact extruder and a sheeter that bolt onto a Hobart’s accessory socket. Capable of doing the work of stand-alone machines costing two-and-a-half times as much, these new devices may prove to be his silver (or in this case, stainless steel) bullet....MORE

Possibly related:
The Quality of Pasta is Not Strained

*On Monday it was the Columbia Journalism Review's "And that’s the way it was: April 1, 1957" which harkened back to this pastoral Swiss scene: