The Memory of the Ham: Tracking Months of Curing with a Tag That Withstands Salt and Steel Brushes

The Client

An industrial-scale ham producer manages thousands of pieces curing at the same time. Each ham goes through months of processing: removal from the cellar, brushing with steel brushes to remove surface mould, re-salting, return to the cellar — a cycle that repeats several times over the course of curing, before the piece is ready.

The Challenge

Without a reliable tracking system, knowing how many times a single piece had been processed and whether it complied with the expected timeline became an exercise in memory or paperwork, with a significant margin of error at such high production volumes. Every processing step is a piece of that ham's history: losing track of it means losing control over the quality and compliance of the curing process.

The technical challenge was made more complex by the extreme environmental conditions of the production cycle: a tag applied to a ham must survive direct, repeated contact with metal brushes, remain readable after months of continuous exposure to salt and cellar humidity, and not detach during repeated handling. A standard adhesive tag would not survive this treatment for even a few weeks.

The Wintag Solution

Wintag designed a tag resistant to repeated mechanical abrasion and prolonged exposure to salt, with a fastening system built to remain intact even through the most aggressive brushing. The choice of materials and encapsulation specifically accounted for cellar conditions — constant humidity, low temperatures, direct contact with salt — to ensure the tag accompanies the piece from start to finish of the process without failure.

The Results

Today, every piece has full traceability for the entire duration of curing, with no breaks in the information chain even after dozens of physical handling operations. The ham producer can precisely reconstruct the processing history of each individual piece, verifying compliance with expected timelines and steps across thousands of products managed in parallel.

Technology Used

For applications on long-cured or long-preserved products, Wintag designs RFID tags with encapsulation resistant to mechanical abrasion, salt and humidity, sized according to the specific processing cycle — handling frequency, overall process duration, type of contact (brushes, brine, containers). The tag's identifier can be linked to the production management systems already in use, to automatically reconstruct the history of each batch or individual piece.

Do you have a production process with repeated physical handling on long-cured or long-preserved products? Let's talk: we can design together a custom tag to accompany the entire process, without losing the story of each individual piece.