Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Before I start, I would like to point out that English is my second language, and please bear with me for any mistakes I may make.
I'm from La Cultura Salumi Inc., a company in Belleville, Ontario. Salumi means “dry-aged meats” in Italian. La Cultura Salumi Inc. is a dry-aging meat plant where we use specialty systems imported from Italy to naturally dry-age the meat. We produce high-quality products with temperature and humidity controls only. We don't inject anything into the meat. We do not put meat in brine. We don't cook the meat or dry-cure it with high temperatures. We use an artisanal way to dry-age bresaola, prosciutto, salami, etc.
We started La Cultura Salumi in 2012, but prior to that my husband had 30 years of experience in the meat industry and had travelled all over Europe to research and understand how to produce high-quality charcuterie products.
Our main product is bresaola. We make beef bresaola, water buffalo bresaola and turkey bresaola. Bresaola is an air-dried salted piece of beef with a long aging procedure. It originated in the Valtellina area of northern Italy. The whole area is dedicated to making bresaola, the speciality product from beef.
There are over 30 major producers, and the biggest one is JBS, and one of the biggest meat processors in the world. They purchased a plant in Valtellina called Rigamonti. Rigamonti produces 125,000 kilos of beef bresaola weekly. But the issue is that over a hundred years ago when Italians started making bresaola, there was enough meat in Italy to supply this product. However, now over the last 40 years, the market in Europe has grown so much that Italy does not have enough beef for the demand for beef bresaola. Italy is now importing beef from South America and Africa to feed the demand.
We knew that Canada is a big resource for beef, providing a wide assortment of quality beef. That is why we decided to make this product in Canada with high-quality Canadian and U.S. beef only. The beef bresaola market is also getting bigger for religious and health reasons, for Muslim and Kosher markets, and also for people who do not eat pork.
Now I would like to say a few words about the challenges of pork we found in Canada. To produce a high-end quality pork salumis as they do in Italy and Spain, the pigs should be a minimum of 12 months old. When we started the dry-curing business, we worked closely with Conestoga Meats in Kitchener, Ontario. The company owners are a group of co-op farmers. Because my husband, Frank, used to deal with Conestoga in his previous business, they agreed and were happy to do a test run for us. They tried to raise the pigs to 12 months, but the animals started to die around nine months. This was due to the fact that the pigs in Canada are modified and the carcasses are not able to hold large weights. Another problem we found is that all slaughterhouses in North America have slaughter lines only for small pigs around six months old. Pork from a six-month-old animal is not the best quality to make high-end, dry-aged products as they do in Italy and Spain. We need 12 month-old animals to have firm meat and less moisture in the meat for dry aging.
After searching all over Canada and the U.S.A. for 12-month-old pigs, we could not find any anywhere. To stick to our passion to make only high-quality aged pork products, we started to import frozen pork from Austria and Spain, and they all are from a minimum of 12-month-old pigs.
Also, I would like to bring to your attention that with the high-end standard at our plant, we cannot ship and sell across Canada because we are a provincially inspected plant.
I am receiving a lot of phone calls and emails from people in businesses all over Canada asking if they can buy from us. Even one owner of five casinos and restaurants in the Calgary area asked me why people from Alberta cannot eat products made in Ontario. This question for us is very important. It does not make sense that Canada has two levels of inspection, provincial and federal. In the U.S.A., for example, for the U.S. market, there is only USDA inspection in all states.
Also, we would like to use the artisanal old Italian way to make bresaola. When we asked our meat inspectors about this, they told us to call Guelph and do a validation study, which will cost around $30,000 or $50,000 for validation, and there is no guarantee they will approve it. With the current regulations, we send samples of every batch we make to the lab in Toronto to check for salmonella, E. coli and other bacteria. It's hard to understand why we cannot make small test batches with no preservatives, which are healthier, and check each test batch in the lab to prove whether it's safe or not. It would cost much less.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak in front of this committee. We hope we will see some positive changes in the near future.