Rural Ravioli: Grain terminal buys family-run pasta maker in small-town Sask.
CBC
Marco de Michele says around 1,000 pizzas and calzones are made every week at Solo Italia Fine Pasta, a small shop operating in Ogema, Sask. since 2012.
But space is limited and demand is growing.
To scale up, co-founders de Michele and his wife Tracey Johnson sought help.
“When you are a family-owned business, it takes a lot of resources and a lot of organization, which we can't,” de Michele said in an interview.
They decided to sell Solo Italia to South West Terminal Limited (SWT), a producer-owned grain handler and crop services company based in Gull Lake, Sask.
South West Terminal announced it had acquired the pasta manufacturer in December 2025.
The company had been looking for ways to expand its retail offerings when the opportunity to acquire Solo Italia came along, CEO Monty Reich said in an interview.
“Marco and Tracey started a great little business of making homemade pasta directly from their roots in Italy and ultimately that whole story matched what we were looking for,” Reich said.
For South West Terminal, the expansion into food processing is value-added work to the grain handling it already does.
“We're trying to get better control of the entire ecosystem of our business right from the farm to how that product moves, whether it's by truck or by rail,” Reich said. “We want to create a stronger value proposition to farmers in our network.”
Solo Italia is run out of a small shop in Ogema, Sask., about 116 km south of Regina. While South West Terminal acquired the company, its two founders will still help run it.
“The workers are like a family for us, and then obviously the quality must remain there … Our goal is to remain and to support and to grow together,” de Michele said. Solo Italia employs 10 people, he added.
Johnson and de Michele met on vacation in Costa Rica. He’s from Italy and didn’t speak English, while she’s from Ogema and didn’t speak Italian. They spoke only in Spanish for the first year of their relationship.
They lived in Italy for a few years, but moved to Ogema and started making pasta at home. Sales were brisk enough that they opened a stand-alone pasta plant and now their frozen pizzas and pasta are sold in grocery stores across the province.
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