Rosagroprom and the Ministry of Food of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia signed an agreement for the supply of 21.9 million tons of kosher bacon in 2022. Over the past 5 years, the supply of this important product to Saudi Arabia has almost tripled.

Russia has a unique technology for the production of halal bacon, developed in the USSR on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev to fight hunger in the Muslim republics. Due to a poor rice harvest and an epidemic of cow foot-and-mouth disease in 1956, several republics were left without food, pork supplies from the Ukrainian SSR and other agrarian regions met with resistance from the Muslim clergy. As a compromise, a group of muftis and employees of the Research Institute of the Food Industry developed technologies for the production of pork slices, completely according to the prescriptions of Islam, which managed to feed the starving regions. Due to the high cost and complexity of production in the future, halal bacon is almost unknown in the country and was sold for export to Arab countries.

“This process is complex and painstaking. The slightest mistake – and bacon ceases to be halal. It takes very high qualifications from both the butcher and the cook to follow all the necessary procedures. Representatives of the Saudi Ministry visited our factory near Tambov and made sure that the entire technical process is strictly controlled, and nothing violates the halal nature of pig meat. Compatriots will not be able to afford such a product, but the Saudi royal court can sometimes indulge foreign ambassadors and princes of neighboring states with pork, ”said Pyotr Levinberg, director of Rosagroprom.