Salsi a Short History

The story of Sibiu salami starts, as stories do, with “Once upon a time”; so, once there lived an Italian by the name of Filippo Dozzi. He was a proud, hardworking man, eager to make a living for himself. A stonemason by craft, around 1885 he settled with his wife at Piatra Arsă stone quarry, in the former hamlet of Poiana Țapului.

He loved the place, maybe because it reminded him of the land of his childhood, in Friscano-Udina.

In addition to being a trained stonemason, Filippo Dozzi also had the gift of knowing how to mix spices and meat, and was a skilled sausage maker. It was a skill he had learned from his Italian family of pioneers in the art of making dry sausages.

As he found the climate of Sinaia suitable for making dry sausages with a very long curing time and months-long shelf life, in 1910 he decided to buy a building that housed a restaurant, a wine cellar, and a hotel.

It was there that he founded „Filippo Dozzi Sole Proprietorship”, and also where he started making Sibiu salami, which soon made its way to the most expensive dinner tables, as it was branded a luxury commodity from the very beginning. In its first years, the factory was a small-scale operation, and expanded as it accrued capital. By 1938, for instance, it was already producing close to 100 tons of Sibiu salami.

After his death, in 1943, Filippo Dozzi left the secret of making Sibiu salami to his sons, Antonio and Giuseppe; they continued their father’s work until the communist regime’s nationalization of all private assets in the country.

• 1910 – Italian sausage maker Filippo Dozzi chooses Sinaia as the location where he would make Sibiu salami. The company’s original name was “Filippo Dozzi Sole Enterprise”.
• 1948 – The company was nationalized; at the time it was already making about 120 tons of salami each year and employed 50 people. The company was named “Industrial Meat Processing Factory”.
• 1967-1968 – The company expanded and its production processes were brought up to date, thus extending the production period from January to December; its planned production capacity shot up to more than 2,000 tons per year, with a staff of 150 people.
• 1990 – The company’s name changes again, to “S.C. SALSI S.A.”, but it still operates as a state-owned enterprise.
• 1995-1998 – Privatization
• 2004-2006 – The “Modernizing SC SALSI SA SINAIA meat processing factory” project starts, funded by a grant from the National SAPARD Agency, to secure ISO and HACCP Certification.
• 2006-2007 – S.C. SALSI starts a second SAPARD-funded project, worth about €2 million. The two projects were focused at upgrading the infrastructure and implicitly the production flow, in order to comply with the requirements of the health and veterinary permit for intra-Community trade of products of animal origin.
• 2007 – The company secures the health and veterinary permit for intra-Community trade of products of animal origin.
• 2008 – Salsi implements and is in the process of obtaining certification for the “lohn” system of trading pork products across the EU under very strict conditions: all meat must be sourced from swine fever-free countries (regions), excluding Romania.
• 2010 – Salsi is listed among the companies that can trade pork products within the EU, pursuant to Article 8a of Decision no. 2008/855/EC.