Mozzarella, pecorino, mascarpone – cheeses labelled with these famous names crowding the shelves of Bologna supermarkets could reasonably be regarded as home-produced wares. But a major deception uncovered by the Italian farmer organisation Coldiretti and the market research institute Eurispes involves these very typical Italian names being used to market cheeses made in Romania from milk as far away as Hungary.

What’s more, the processor responsible, a cheese maker based in the Romanian city of Temesvar, calls itself Lactitalia and ensures that labels for its “Italian” cheeses, including a mozzarella called “La Dolce Vita”, give the impression that Italian cheesemakers produced the goods.

Coldiretti claims that Italy in particular suffers under a series of similar marketing scams that sees pesto, olive oil, tomatoes – even Parma hams – being produced in other countries and sold at bargain prices with Italian labels in the country’s supermarkets.

But even with Romania-based Lactitalia the Italian farmers have had difficulties presenting their case. Up until this spring, the Italian government did indeed have a 12% share in the dairy through the export bank Società Italiana per le Imprese all’Estero (SIMEST), a finance institution dedicated to supporting and promoting the activities of Italian companies abroad. And it appears that, strictly speaking, the Romanian dairy making Italian cheeses with Hungarian milk had indeed a claim to Italian government support: the farmers discovered that the plant’s main shareholder is an Italian national.

Footnote: Among the misleadingly labelled wares highlighted by recent Coldiretti research are “Italian” tomatoes from China and “Lombardy” olive oil from Africa.