Total quality management of the PDO Prosciutto San Daniele

A product is a bundle of internal-external attributes concurring to satisfy the consumer's physiological and psychological needs, these last ones growing in the ranking of consumer's preferences for the higher education and better income achieved in the present socio-economic environment. The progresses occurred in the food industry and strategies of the distribution may have affected the perceptions about food products, affecting the preference order. For typical products the question is if they are still appreciated for their intrinsic quality or better perceived for the intangible values of tradition, artisan style, cultural, historical or ethnological values, geographic location and others. Social and cultural changes may have affected the consumer's preferences for safety, hygienic, nutritional, dietetic attributes, achieved by standardised processing of industrial technologies, while the more pragmatic way of living could have increased the cost opportunity for food preparations. However, the growth of San Daniele ham demand shows that, despite these changes in life style and convergence toward the international "fast food "stereotypes, the search for quality of typical food is growing and segmented markets are possible when producers are committed to produce quality and better chain organisation can combine the original product quality with processing technologies and market strategies to improve the consumer perception for typical products.