How Italian Dairy Farmers Are Using Big Data To Make Better Cheese [Photos]

By Bernhard Warner

The so-called king of cheeses, Parmigiano Reggiano, has been crafted the same way for a millennium, using three simple ingredients: milk, salt, and a natural enzyme called rennet. Now, there’s a crucial fourth ingredient in the mix, and that’s data.

Have a look at the cheese-making process, as documented on site in the Italian region of Reggio Emelia, then listen to the Wild Ducks podcast to hear the whole story about how IBM is helping Italy’s cheese masters improve their product and fight fraud in the marketplace.

Luigi Fino is the cheese master at Caseificio Scalabrini, one of nearly 350 Italian dairies certified to make Parmigiano Reggiano. The recipe is older than Italy and even the Italian language. But Fino is among the first generation to produce enough to satisfy a global appetite. To do that, he and his peers are turning to data analytics to help eliminate waste in the production process.

Per EU mandate, the milk used to make parmesan cheese can only come from grass-fed cows living within a 10,000-square kilometer region that spans all or part of five Italian provinces: Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantua.

Parmesan is to north-central Italy as wine is to Bordeaux or corn is to Iowa. It’s part of the culture. Like most dairy farms dedicated to parmesan, Caseificio Scalabrini is a family-run business. Here, Luigi and his wife, Rossella Di Monte, prepare to remove a ball of cheese weighing about 85 pounds.

Cheese never sleeps! Seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, the cheese makers start their day around 4 am. By late morning they’ve removed the day’s production – in Italian, these newborn forms are called, “le forme gemelle,” or twins -- from huge copper vats that hold 1200 liters of milk.

Once the cheese is formed into its signature wheel shape, a small disc – called “casein plate” – containing a unique numeric ID is affixed to the surface. Luigi scans the bar code on the disc to log the wheel into the database.

Parmesan is aged at least 12 months. On average, cheese makers age it a minimum of 24 months. This process takes place in massive warehouses. At Caseficio Scalabrini, they age more than a thousand wheels on site. This photo was taken nearby in what could very well be called the Fort Knox of cheese. According to the warehouse manager, it holds more than 300,000 wheels from various dairies. Together their retail value is roughly $300 million.

After 12 months, the cheese expert appointed by the consortium inspects each wheel by tapping a hammer along the sides. Unusual sounds and unexpected vibrations mean a wheel is defective. As recently as 100 years ago, the defect rate was 50%. Today, it’s about 8% and the cheese masters are using analytics to reduce that number further.

Parmigiano Reggiano can sell for $20/pound or more in the United States and several times that in Japan and Russia. For that price, consumers expect consistent quality. According to Simone Ficarelli, head of external marketing for Consorzio del Parmigiano Reggiano, analytics helps the cheese makers determine the conditions that lead to failure. This in turn helps protect the Parmigiano Reggiano brand.

For centuries, counterfeiters have tried to pass off their hard cheeses as Parmigiano Reggiano. But lately, according to Italy’s farmer’s association Coldiretti, the amount of hard cheeses using names that confusingly or fraudulently sound like Parmigiano Reggiano hit an all-time record in 2014. Here, left to right, IBM Wild Ducks reporters Jeffrey O’Brien and Bernhard Warner talk with consortium fraud expert Alberto Pecorari and Igino Morini, head of the press office. The Parmigiano Reggiano team believes that the same identifiers that make parmesan wheels traceable could soon serve as a valuable weapon to help identify and eliminate bogus parmesan.

Luigi Fino, the head cheese master at Caseficio Scalabrini, is proof that Wild Ducks can show up in unexpected places. “We cheese makers are constantly striving to improve. It’s part of who we are. What we experience today should serve as lessons to teach us about tomorrow,” he says, translated from his native Italian. “It’s the desire and the drive, and now the technology too, that are helping us improve our craft day after day."

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Bernhard Warner is a veteran journalist and partner at the storytelling studio StoryTK. He's written for Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, and Wired and many other publications.