Parmigiano Reggiano Wheel Anatomy

wheelAnatomyBecause every Parmigiano Reggiano® cheese wheel is made according to the same regulations and the same traditional methods, you can count on high quality regardless of which wheel your wedge happened to be cut from.

At the same time, Parmigiano Reggiano is an all-natural artisanal cheese, so one wheel may differ in small ways from another. Each batch of milk is slightly different, depending on the particular cows, what they ate, the season of the year, the precise geographic location of the herd, the soil, the climate and so on. The practices of cheese artisans may differ in subtle ways—and the length of aging for each wheel can certainly vary.

As a result, each Parmigiano Reggiano wheel offers the best of two cheese-making worlds: consistent quality and small but sometimes distinctive differences. These differences are the hallmarks of the artisanal cheese-making process. It is also what separates a hard grating cheese made by hand from an industrially made hard grating cheese.

Parmigiano Reggiano Statistics 2014

3.297.723 number of wheels produced in 2014 (3.279.156 ln 2013)
12 months minimum aging process
24 months average aging of the wheels
14 liters milk to make 1kg of cheese
550 liters
milk to make one wheel
40 kg weight of a wheel
3.348 producers of milk (3.439 in 2013)
245.000 cows
15% italian milk production
363 numbers of dairies (374 in 2013)
1.020 million euro rating business to production
2.028 million euro rating business to consumption
50.000 employees
34% export volume/total production