Verificación racial de jamones y paletas Ibéricos comercializados en supermercados españoles

The commercialization of Iberian meat and dry-cured products is regulated by the Spanish law. A first decree approved on 2007 (Real Decreto 1469/2007) established that Iberian products designated as “Iberian” have to come from pigs with at least a 50% of their genome from Iberian breed and the remaining percentage from Duroc. This decree was modified on 2014 (Real Decreto 4/2014) and it requires that, to be labelled as “100% Iberian”, products must come from purebred pigs and maintains the previous regulation about “Iberian” label. A traceability SNP chip containing 64 SNPs was developed by the Pig Breeding and Genetics Group of INIA. It allows discriminating between the proportion of Iberian and Duroc genomes of an individual. The objective of this study was to check if the dry-cured products (hams and shoulders) sold as “Iberian” by some of the major distributors of Iberian products at main Spanish supermarkets follow the law. One hundred and sixteen samples of dry-cured ham and shoulder sliced packs commercialized as “Iberian” were genotyped with the chip. The genotyping data was analysed using BAPS 5.3. A percentage of Iberian genome lower than 40% was estimated for 34.5% of the samples, which do not follow the regulation of genetic origin. It is worth to note that five of the 116 samples were 100% Duroc. None of the suppliers included in the study met the law strictly. These results show that, in general, the Quality Standard has not been obeyed for a long time. A future new sampling will show if the stricter controls of the animals set by the 2014 law has been useful to improve the legal compliance.