Supermarket Bacon

In 1924, a German immigrant named Oscar Mayer began producing and selling sliced, packaged bacon in Chicago. Previously, bacon had to be ordered, sliced, and wrapped in paper at the meat counter—services for which customers paid extra—or, more cheaply, bought in slabs and sliced at home with varying degrees of success and food safety. Mayer wasn't the first to slice bacon before it hit the shops or even the first to protect it with ready-made, easy-to-grab packaging. But he knew a good idea when he saw one; by marketing these innovations extensively, Mayer helped make bacon a true convenience product, more accessible to consumers and easier to cook consistently. And in so doing, he helped usher in a new era of ubiquity for bacon in American homes.

Packaged bacon has come a long way since 1924, but its popularity endures. According to a recent report by market research group Mintel, 70 percent of American adults eat it regularly. We wanted to know how the classic supermarket bacons measured up, so we bought five of the top-selling products (as assessed by IRI, a Chicago-based market research firm), priced from $4.00 to $10.39 per pound. We tasted them side by side, both plain and in BLTs.

How Bacon Is Made

Each slab of bacon is produced from pork belly, the fatty strip of meat found on the underside of a pig. The hogs are butchered, typically when they're six to seven months old and weigh 175 to 240 pounds. The belly is removed from each hog and then skinned and trimmed to size.

Next the bellies are cured. Curing is a process of preservation that uses salt and two additives, sodium nitrite and either sodium ascorbate or sodium erythorbate. These ingredients inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria (most important, Clostridium botulinum, the microbe responsible for deadly botulism) and give bacon its characteristic pink color and “cured” flavor. A sweetener (sugar or dextrose) is added to the cure to enhance flavor, and sodium phosphate is often included to help the bacon retain moisture.

Historically, the cure ingredients were applied as a dry rub to the pork bellies, which were then left to sit for up to a few months to allow the cure to penetrate the meat. Since dry curing is time-consuming, most large-scale commercial operations instead dissolve the cure ingredients in water, forming a brine. They then either immerse the bellies in that brine or, more often, use needles to inject the brine directly into the meat. The injection process is more efficient and cost-effective, taking just 6 to 24 hours compared to weeks for the immersion method. The injected bellies are usually tumbled in rotating drums to help distribute the cure... read more