Champion pasta maker from the NSW South Coast

Five years after a former chef asked why Australian durum wheat was being shipped to Italy and returned as premium pasta, his South Nowra business Duro Pasta has been named Champion Dried Pasta at the 2026 Sydney Royal Fine Food Show for the second year in a row.

Duro’s Gigli — meaning ‘lilies’ in Italian — a ruffled, flower-shaped pasta, received a gold medal before being named Champion Dried Pasta, repeating its gold and Champion result from 2025.

Seven of the eight Duro pasta entries at this year’s Sydney Royal Fine Food Show received medals, including two gold.

Duro makes its pasta in South Nowra using just two ingredients: semolina produced from durum wheat grown around Bellata in Northern NSW and milled in Tamworth, and filtered water.

The pasta is extruded through traditional bronze dies, creating a rough, porous surface that helps sauce cling to it, before being slowly dried at low temperatures to develop flavour, structure and a firm bite.

The idea for Duro started with a 2021 conversation between founder Jesse Hegg and a Northern NSW durum wheat farming and milling family.

At the time, Hegg was running Locale Foods, a providore business supplying bespoke and locally produced ingredients to chefs and food businesses across the NSW South Coast. During that conversation, he learned that Australian durum wheat was being exported to Italy, made into dried pasta and then shipped back to Australia.

The scale of that export trade remains significant, with Australia sending more than 100,000 tonnes of durum wheat to Italy in the year to September 2025, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

“I remember thinking, this is mad. We grow excellent durum wheat in Australia, send it halfway around the world and then buy it back as pasta. Why aren’t we making more premium dried pasta here?” Hegg said.

With international travel restricted during the pandemic, much of Duro’s early technical support came through video calls and emails with Italian equipment manufacturers.

When travel eventually became possible, Hegg visited Italy to gain hands-on experience at Pastificio Giannobile, a small artisan pasta factory in Abruzzo.

“I’d made a lot of pasta during my time in commercial kitchens, but manufacturing dried pasta added a whole new level of technical complexity,” Hegg said.

Chefs became some of Duro’s earliest and strongest supporters, with its pasta having featured on menus at restaurants including Three Blue Ducks, Fratelli Fresh, Chiswick Woollahra, The Boathouse, Bathers’ Pavilion and Jonah’s Whale Beach.

“We started Duro because we believed Australia had the ingredients and capability to make genuinely great dried pasta here. To be named Champion two years running validates that original idea,” Hegg said.

The Sydney Royal Pasta Competition is a national competition for Australian pasta producers, with all entries required to use 100% Australian-grown grain.

Duro’s Gigli was named Champion Dried Pasta in both 2025 and 2026. In 2026, Gigli and Fusilli received gold medals; Fusilloni, Lumache and Casarecce received silver; and Penne and Rigatoni received bronze.

Images: Supplied