Eco-Designing Convenience Food: A Monte Carlo Product Environmental Footprint Assessment of Dry, Fresh, and Instant Pasta Systems

The global pasta industry is increasingly challenged to reconcile consumer demand for convenience with the need to reduce environmental impacts across the food supply chain. This study presents a cradle-to-grave Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) assessment integrated with Monte Carlo stochastic simulations to evaluate four durum wheat (Triticum durum) semolina pasta systems: traditional dry pasta, fresh pasta, instant pasta in a rigid cup, and an eco-designed instant pasta in a flexible pouch. Systems were evaluated using a primary functional unit of 1 kg of commercial product and normalized to an isocaloric serving to account for variations in moisture content and preparation. When evaluated across the full cradle-to-grave system boundary, traditional dry pasta (1.91 ± 0.08 kg CO2e/kg) and flexible-pouch instant pasta (1.72 ± 0.08 kg CO2e/kg) achieve comparable, lowest overall impacts, while the rigid cup format (3.85 ± 0.17 kg CO2e/kg) is heavily penalized by packaging mass intensity and transport inefficiency. Industrial starch pre-gelatinization creates a porous structure enabling rapid passive rehydration (0.90 kWh/kg domestic energy), which fully offsets factory thermal inputs (0.326 kWh/kg) and dramatically outperforms traditional stovetop boiling (2.40 kWh/kg). Crucially, replacing rigid cups with flexible pouches reduces total packaging material mass per kg of net pasta product by 72.5% (279.8 g/kg vs. 1016.2 g/kg), avoiding severe volumetric logistics penalties. Conversely, fresh pasta incurs the highest Climate Change impact (4.14 ± 0.17 kg CO2e/kg) due to continuous cold-chain distribution and storage requirements. Overall, this work demonstrates that shifting thermal energy processing from domestic preparation to factory pre-gelatinization—when combined with ambient shelf stability and lightweight flexible packaging—provides a promising eco-design strategy to decarbonize convenience foods, subject to commercial validation of packaging barrier performance and consumer acceptance.