The makers of Italy's famed Parmigiano Reggiano cheese have a new tool in fighting fake wheels of the highly-prized and highly-priced cheese: they're inserting a microchip in the 40 kg wheels of cheese.
The grain-of-salt-sized chip, said to be 'food safe,' is inserted into the rind and is not actually meant to be consumed. The cheese, which has a Protected Designation of Origin, is made only by members of a consortium that includes 350 or so farms in the area that includes Parma, Reggio Emilia and Modena.
At an average of €20 kilo, counterfeiting the cheese can be lucrative, and the previous method of assigning serial numbers to the wheels had little effect. Producers say that counterfeiters selling ordinary Parmesan cheese as Parmigiano Reggiano are netting about €1.84 billion a year.
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