Food Safety

Parma Ham is not just an all natural product, but being a cured and salted product, can be considered a safe food from a hygienic-food safety point of view. An important distinction is to be made between hams which undergo a long curing (such as Parma Ham) and fresh meat products or products which are processed but not cured, the latter involve higher risk than the aged ones.

The characteristics of Parma Ham at the end of the curing process (water activity - aw < 0.92) make the presence of pathogenous bacteria (such as listeria monocytogenes or Salmonella spp.) in the final product virtually impossible.
The Consorzio del Parma Ham has always put great effort into the search for more food safety; the principle of traceability, the strict controls and the total absence of any chemical additive make our product a safe, healthy and totally natural food. Moreover the application, done by the producing plants themselves, of GMP ( Good Manufacturing Practice), SSOP ( Standard Sanitation Operating Procedure) and HACCP ( Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point), thoroughly reduce any type of risk.

We can consider Parma Ham a safe product also as to what concerns animal health. According to scientific studies, all the most important viruses causing infective diseases in pig are inactivated by the curing process thanks to the salting technique. All experiments and tests conducted in order to re-open the U.S. market and further extra-EU countries, proved that, at the end of a curing process of at least 400 days, the viruses mentioned above are no longer present in the ham despite a previous highly concentrated inoculation in the swine used for the experiment. (Mc Kercher et al.1987: CAN. Inst. Food. Sci. Technology. J., Vol. 20 No.4, pp. 267-272; Mc Kercher et al.1985: CAN. Inst. Food. Sci. Technology. J., Vol. 18 No.2, pp. 163-167).
Therefore Parma Ham is totally free from animal health risks.

- top -