Parmesan: The cheese used as bank collateral

https://english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2026-06-02/parmesan-the-cheese-used-as-bank-collateral.html

Parmesan: The cheese used as bank collateral

LAURA CAORSI
Parma, Italy - JUN 02, 2026 - 12:52 EDT

What do medieval monasteries in Emilia-Romagna have in common with a local bank founded in 1910? Both made food preservation part of their daily work. In their own ways and in their own eras, monks and bankers have pursued the same goal in the same place: to profit from a singular product — a cheese capable of staying in good condition for years and increasing in value as it ages. This food, which ensured monastic survival in the 12th century, is now part of Italy’s gastronomic heritage and lies at the heart of a financial model that is so peculiar it has even been studied by Harvard Business School.

What makes the model remarkable is that the bank — Credem — accepts wheels of cheese as collateral when granting loans to producers. The institution lends between 60% and 80% of the product’s value and stores it under its own custody in its warehouses. If the producer defaults, the bank recovers its money by selling the cheese it has been aging. The system works thanks to the product’s economic value — these warehouses are estimated to hold around €325 million ($378 million) worth of cheese — and its outstanding culinary reputation worldwide. And what is used as collateral is no ordinary product, but wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.

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Parmesan cheese is protected by intellectual property rights. In Europe, PDO certification guarantees its origin, its ingredients, and the methods used in its production. It also prevents similar cheeses from using its name or misleading labels — such as “Parmesan-style” or “Parmesan-type”— to benefit from those similarities. Outside the European Union, however, the situation is very different, to the point that this cheese is one of the most counterfeited foods in the world. And it’s a market that moves millions.

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“The cheesemaker works with a living, natural product: the milk changes daily according to the season, the climate and what the cows are fed,” he adds, and the latter matters more than it might seem. Parmigiano Reggiano’s link to its territory runs deep: its uniqueness lies above all in a microbiological factor that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. The cows’ diet — based on local forage, grass and hay — gives the milk a distinctive bacterial activity of its own, like a fingerprint shaped by the local microflora.

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