Creminelli Fine Meats is a food and drink brand founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2007.
When Creminelli started, U.S. rules required raw cured meats to age at least 400 days before import. Italian-style salami cures in three to four weeks, and as Matt Caputo told the Salt Lake Tribune, "salami after 100 days will dry up and blow away." So Creminelli Fine Meats makes it in Salt Lake City, where the dry climate resembles northern Italy's.
Chris Bowler met Cristiano Creminelli while working for the U.S. Olympic Committee ahead of the 2006 Torino Games. Cristiano was taking over his family's salami business in Biella. In 2007, with Jared Lynch as a third partner, they started in the basement of Tony Caputo's market, with hogs from farms in Logan and southern Idaho. Cristiano got up every few hours to check the salami by touch and smell. "I treat them just like a baby," he said.
The basement operation now runs out of a 75,000 square foot plant on Wright Brothers Drive.
Private equity has owned Creminelli since January 2020, when Entrepreneurial Equity Partners merged it with Daniele International. Industrial Opportunity Partners bought the parent in 2025, and Cristiano stayed on. The salami is still made in Salt Lake City, where the founders came for the air.
Before Creminelli won a 2013 Sofi Award for its Campania salami, it finished as a silver finalist at the Sofi Awards four years in a row.
