Goleta Schoolkids Embrace Etto Pasta

Kids love spaghetti, but spaghetti doesn’t always love kids — at least when it comes to being served in the strict amounts dictated by school nutrition standards across California. 

“Scooping spaghetti is kind of hard,” explained Hannah Carroll, the director of food services for the Goleta Unified School District. “The long noodles fall out of the scoop, and they can’t get very accurate portions.”

Carroll, who came to this job in 2021 after similar roles in Virginia and Lompoc, ran into this conundrum when the district’s students requested spaghetti on an annual food preference survey. She thought back to her own childhood in Pennsylvania, and remembered SpaghettiOs, the tiny, circular noodles popularized by cans of Campell’s Soup.

It would be “a fun throwback,” believed Carroll, “but we wanted to make a healthy, Goleta-style version.” Unfortunately, no one was selling the massive pasta amounts that Goleta Unified would need to serve its 2,400 students in preschool to 6th grade across nine campuses.

Then Carroll heard about Etto Pastificio. The Paso Robles pasta company started in 2017 as a tiny operation producing about 50 pounds a week but now pumps out more than 5,000 pounds weekly. About half of that goes to Central Coast restaurants and retailers — any self-respecting Santa Barbara foodie should know Etto well — and the rest is sold to school districts from Ventura and Anaheim to Santa Clara and Placerville. 

Etto’s founder Brian Terrizzi was happy to help. “Brian was really great,” said Carroll, explaining that it took a couple tries to create a new spaghetti-o that worked for Goleta’s cooking and transportation systems. “It’s cool to talk to the owner of a business and then feel like he’s literally in the kitchen trying to make this special noodle for us.”

Carroll debuted the “GUSD Spaghetti O’s” — which come with a five-veggie, scratch-made marinara and garlic-mozzarella bread twists — on October 17, 2024, which was National Pasta Day. “Now,” she said, “it’s one of our top sellers.”

Etto Origins

Wine is what led Brian and Stephanie Terrizzi to pasta. The couple started a wine brand focused on Italian varieties called Giornata in 2006 and became one of the first winery tenants in Paso’s (then) new Tin City development six years later. After helping to open the warehouse district’s first restaurant, Tin Canteen, the Terrizzis were offered to take over a small space next door, which they thought could work as a market with pasta-making center stage.

Though he’d made pasta with his grandmother growing up in Cincinnati, Terrizzi realized doing so at a commercial scale was a different animal. So, he did what he did with wine, which he learned to make by living in Tuscany.

“I did a bunch of research, which took me to southern Italy outside of Naples,” said Terrizzi. He landed in Gragnano, home to the top producers of artisanal dried pasta. “I figured out what equipment they used and how they did everything,” he said. “It took two years of research and making a lot of pasta at home.”

He needed a bigger pasta maker than what restaurants used but much smaller than what big pasta factories require. “We were the first to my knowledge buying this quality of machine in the U.S. market,” said Terrizzi. 

The first customers were their children’s classmates at the Montessori School in Atascadero. Then the parents, many of them winemakers too, wanted some. “Before we knew it, restaurants wanted it, and that took off,” said Terrizzi, who opened the Etto retail market in 2018. “Then the San Luis Obispo school district got wind of it.”

That district’s food program is run by Erin Primer, who is known as a visionary in school nutrition. “She wanted hundreds of pounds of pasta,” said Terrizzi of that 2019 development. “That made things more serious.”

The noodle knowledge spread, becoming favorites in districts where the kids wouldn’t eat the prior pasta offerings. “Kids are serious food critics, especially after COVID because they started cooking and learning about food,” said Terrizzi, who credits school food professionals for spreading the word to more than 20 districts today. “When they get a winner, they get super excited about it.”

He uses organic, durum wheat semolina, which is low glycemic but high in protein and complex carbohydrates. “For active kids, it’s like 36 hours of energy without sugar spikes,” said Terrizzi. “People think carbs are bad, that they make you fat. It’s totally not true. Italians have very low obesity, very low incidence of heart problems, very long lifespans, and they literally eat pasta every day. Good quality pasta is a cornerstone of a healthy diet.”

With production at least doubling each year — thanks in part to opening Tin City’s Etto Pasta Bar three years ago — the Terrizzis built a warehouse-sized Etto factory adjacent to Tin City in 2023. They now offer very popular factory tours for all ages, including a pasta lunch and even wine tasting if you’d like. 

“Easily over 10,000 people a week are eating our pasta on the Central Coast, between the schools, restaurants, and at home — it’s kind of amazing,” he said. “The wine launched Etto, and now Etto is pushing the wine. We’re just trying to do what we did with Giornata: being true and authentic to Italy.”

He’s impressed with how committed these school food professionals are to providing quality food to their students. “The people, like Hannah, who are serious about these school lunch programs have a very strong network,” he said. “They really pay attention to what’s going on.”

More for the Menu

Etto is just one of the direct partnerships that powers Goleta Unified’s central kitchen, which is located on Fairview Avenue across from the library. The district buys burritos and pupusas from a female-owned business in the Bay Area, finger limes from Shanley Farm in Morro Bay, oranges and stone fruit from Galpin Farms in Reedley, and regenerative, grass-finished beef hot dogs from a California producer. 

“If you exclude apples, 95 percent of our produce is California-grown, and 63 percent of our meals are scratch-made,” said Carroll. It’s not necessarily more expensive, so long as you have staff that can reuse core recipes for multiple dishes. They use the spaghetti-o five-veggie marinara, for instance, in lasagna, in a beef rotini, and as a dipping sauce for grilled cheese. 

“Once a district can figure out how to scratch cook, and find the people with the right skills to do it, you can really cut costs,” said Carroll. 

She’s now working with districts around the county and beyond to create a values-aligned purchasing group to focus on buying more local, organic, and regeneratively grown foods in eco-friendly packaging. “By working together, we can create stronger buying power, which helps small farms and producers participate by filling full truckloads and reduces costs for everyone,” explained Carroll. 

There’s an auxiliary benefit for Carroll and her staff. “I eat our lunch almost every single day,” she said. “We all do.”
See ettopastificio.com and follow the Goleta Union Food Services at @gusdfood.