Monty & Sons: The husband and wife duo putting a Kiwi twist on an Italian classic

We’ve got four farmers who grow amazing durum wheat for us using regenerative practices, which is then milled in New Zealand. There’s nothing added to the flour, there’s no folic acid, there’s no anything, it’s just pure white flour.

We then use the best techniques and processes to turn it into what we think is good pasta for people to eat that’s healthy and doesn’t leave people feeling bloated and sore.

What inspired you to start the business?

Monty: I grew up on a sheep and beef cropping farm, and then I was a winemaker for well over a decade, so production and farming are kind of my forte. A catalyst for the business was understanding that when you import food, you import other people’s farming practices as well. In New Zealand, the farming sector’s doing pretty well, but viticulture and the arable sector are not doing as great.

I think there is some really cool innovation to be done in the arable sector. There is so much you could do with the sector to make more premium products, and as an industry that doesn’t get a lot of love, our pasta is trying to get it a bit.

How did you decide on the techniques for making pasta?

Monty: It was a lot of calls back and forth to Italian manufacturers and reading obscure science journals on gluten and temperature, so a lot of research. It seems like quite a simple thing to do, but there’s so much that goes into it. The quality of the ingredients is paramount, but there’s so much stuff around the pressure and drying cycles that all have to be perfect. It’s been a journey for sure.

Jess: I think a lot of the techniques we use are about retaining the integrity of the wheat. We don’t want to be a mass producer of pasta; we want to keep it small batch and do it properly. By that, I mean we slow-dry it overnight, so our processors are slower. We could bring it out faster, but then the product’s not as good.

What challenges or opportunities are there when it comes to shapes?

Jess: Some of our shapes are definitely harder to make than others. The trumpets take Monty a lot longer to make than some of the other ones, and the rigatoni’s quite tricky with the temperature. There’s definitely some new products in the mix, whether that’s different shapes, but also different types of pasta would be cool as well.

Monty: It depends. At the moment, our staples work well, but we’re going to start doing some product testing on some other fun stuff that people probably haven’t seen in the world of pasta before. We’re not bound by any rules or traditions like Italians. It’s like in the wine world, you’re not bound by what people have done traditionally.

What’s been the biggest challenge in starting the business?

Monty: One of the biggest things, in my opinion, has been getting all of our equipment and things out of Italy. It’s been a struggle, especially because of the world at the moment when it comes to shipping. It’s just taken a lot longer than we thought.

We thought we were going to have everything set up way before when we did, but things were just stuck on the ships in Singapore. It also would have been much cheaper, but we paid a deposit and then the currency from Euro to NZ suddenly just went through the roof. Cash flow in the beginning is always hard, but that was tough.

What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?

Monty: Have a crack, but talk to people and figure out if there’s demand for your product before you go out into the world. Because once you’ve gauged that market, it’s much easier to set things up like a website now to be able to grow.

Jess: I feel like we did a lot of planning before we even got the machinery, so we spent a lot of time while we were waiting getting other stuff sorted. But at the end of the day, you can only spend so much time planning before you just need to rip the plaster off and get into it.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.