BURRILLVILLE – Tucked away off of Route 102 down a road aptly named for its products, a fine Italian meat manufacturer continues to grow, improving facilities and acquiring competing producers to become the largest of its kind in the country.
Charcuterie Artisans celebrated the opening of a new ‘Innovation Center’ this week, just one element of a $12 million investment in the business’s headquarters on Charcuterie Drive.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony followed an announcement just last week that the company had purchased yet another large producer of premium pork products, La Quercia Cured Meats out of Iowa.
Local and state officials who gathered at the dry-cured meat maker’s massive Burrillville campus to mark the expansion on Tuesday got a first-hand look at what it takes to dominate such a specialized market, with tours through a portion of the high tech, 561,444-square-foot facility. They’d learn every step in the nine month prosciutto-making process while side-stepping robots that work hand-in-hand with a staff of nearly 600 human counterparts.
But first, it was the new center – a showroom for the company’s production capabilities geared toward the many grocers it serves – that took center stage.
“This, for us, is a big step forward,” said Gianni Santamaria, general manager and head of innovation for the business. “We’re taking steps to make sure we’re in the community for another 50 years.”
The story of how a small town in northern Rhode Island would become home of the nation’s largest charcuterie manufacturer began in the region of Trieste in northeastern Italy, where, in 1945, Croatian husband and wife refugees Stefano and Caroline Dukcevich began making the dry-cured delicacies.
The couple’s youngest son, Vlado Dukcevich, moved his family to Pascoag in 1977, and built a prosciutto plant known as Daniele, Inc.
That business would grow in Burrillville under generations of the Dukcevich family, opening a $50 million facility in Burrillville’s “Commerce Park” in 2012. It was an expansion onto property off Broncos Highway that was aided at the time by the town’s decision years earlier to purchase the land and invest in infrastructure for creation of an industrial district.
In 2019, Daniele was purchased by Chicago-based Entrepreneurial Equity Partners, and months later merged with another artisan producer, Creminelli Fine Meats of Utah.
Today, the company sells Creminelli, Daniele, and Del Duca brands to dozens of retailers under the Charcuterie Artisans banner, with customers ranging from Walmart to Trader Joe’s.
Creminelli founder Cristiano Creminelli still works with the team, growing operations under the mantra that craftsmanship and scale are not opposing forces.
“Usually, meat companies are very simple,” said Creminelli at the launch, noting the new center will help the business to continue merging long-standing tradition with new ideas.
In the Innovation Center, retailers will have a chance to create custom designs with Charcuterie’s products, with input on everything from packaging color, to size and selection.
“The brainstorming will take place in this facility,” said Santamaria. “Our products are going everywhere.”
“These display cases are emblematic of the state of Rhode Island, on shelves everywhere,” said U.S. Congressman Gabe Amo, who visited town for the launch.
Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos described the company as “great community partners.”
“The products made in Rhode Island are going all over the world,” she said.
Town Manager Michael Wood added that “the business has been great for the town.”
Matos was among those to later travel on a luxury bus to another part of the campus for a tour of operations.
Donning hair and beard nets along with protective gowns for safety, visitors witnessed prosciutto and salami production in a 435,000-square-foot warehouse featuring 15 slicing and five packaging lines. The company purchases pigs from just three suppliers, and employs a staff of 598 in Burrillville, along with eight robots to pick and move meats in various stages of production
“We have manual labor working with automation,” explained Charcuterie Artisan Executive Vice President of Operations & Supply Chain Mario Muza.
For prosciutto, the process includes two weeks of salting, followed by months of aging.
“That’s the only ingredient used in prosciutto making – it’s salt and time,” said Muza.
The process, Muza noted, is a large-scale replication of the methods perfected in Italian cellars over thousands of years.
“It’s art, with science,” he said, offering another take on the Charcuterie mission of work that is “rooted in old world technique” and “guided by modern standards of food safety, consistency, and scale.”
Meat that comes in weighing 28 pounds, he noted, goes out for packaging at 11 pounds once the process is complete.
“That’s why it’s so expensive,” Muza said.
With salami, it’s a two-step process using temperature-controlled rooms for fermenting and drying.
Muza noted the company is still “growing into” the warehouse space, which has capacity to produce 825,000 pounds of meat per week. Another 115,000 square foot facility, he noted, is currently under renovation, and the business also has production facilities in Utah.
Muza noted every piece of equipment in Charcuterie Artisan’s massive operation is fully dismantled and sanitized nightly, in keeping with safety standards.
With the growth and investment in the Burrillville headquarters, Marketing Director Michael Burgess said the now leading U.S. fine meat manufacturer hopes to send a clear message.
“Rhode Island was our home, it is our home and we aren’t going anywhere,” Burgess said.
Good for this company, but I really wish they could do something “state of the art” about the fans on the roof. The sound is almost constant at my property. Winter is better with windows closed and deep snow. During the summer it’s like a hovering plane that never lands and drowns out the natural sounds, especially at night.