Smithfield Foods has stopped producing the brand-name Genuine Smithfield Hams that have become synonymous with the company’s namesake town.
“We have decided to discontinue production of Smithfield Genuine Hams in 2024,” Smithfield Vice President of Corporate Affairs Jim Monroe confirmed in a Jan. 24 email to The Smithfield Times.
“Consumer preferences have shifted and other Smithfield hams are in much higher demand by a wide margin,” Monroe said. “Spiral-cut smoked hams, in particular, are wildly popular with consumers.”
According to Monroe, the smokehouse Smithfield Foods invested $1.8 million to build in 2019, replacing an older facility housing the company’s Genuine Smithfield Ham production, will be repurposed to instead produce Smithfield’s mild-cure hams, which are similar but require only four months of aging rather than the minimum six mandated under a nearly century-old state law.
In 1926, state lawmakers fearful of outsiders looking to enter Virginia’s meatpacking industry decreed hams could only be branded as “Genuine Smithfield” if created using the “long-cure, dry salt method” and aged a minimum of six months, all “within the corporate limits of the town of Smithfield.”