Hi, as people have said it needs a human hand to guide the process. I used one of these in an Italian restaurant and would produce around 400-600 packets of pasta a day.

With production I had to do things like:

• Mix the right amounts of flour and water.

• Adjust the speed of the blade to produce the correct length of pasta. This would need to be adjusted per type or if there was less flour and thus less pressure (speed) behind the pasta coming out.

• If it was spaghetti or linguini for example I would have to cut them by hand and fold them up in the right portions with a specific amount of space between the batches so it would cool adequately.

• Batch up pastas that had been made while the machine was running.

• Cleaning, lots and lots of cleaning! Every mold would have to be cleaned before being put on the machine and after use the whole machine needed to be cleaned, that was quite the challenge sometimes.

• A number of times the rotating knife had become too blunt of broken in some other ways. In those cases I had to cut every pasta by hand.

The tempo of work was high, but with some good music it was suoer chill.

Generally I would start at 11 am and end my shift at either 5 or 6 pm.

If you have any more questions, apparently I love to talk about my pasta production days.

I sell packaging equipment in the food industry, I have a lot of business with pasta specifically and you definitely need someone overseeing these machines. Fewer people than if you were to do it by hand of course but still need an operator.

In manufacturing “operate” can mean a lot of things. For this machine, they probably mix the ingredients, add the mixed ingredients to this machine, clear jams or other faults, and clean the machine at the end of a run.

Depending on the factory they may also run different compositions or different shapes of pasta for different products. The operator would have to know which transitions need what level of cleaning, and they would clean and change the die.