Because 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