Supermarket Bacon

IN 1924, GERMAN immigrant Oscar Mayer began producing and selling sliced, packaged bacon in Chicago. He wasn’t the first to slice bacon before it hit the shops or even the first to protect it with easy-to-grab packaging. But by marketing these innovations extensively, Mayer made bacon a true convenience product and helped usher in a new era of ubiquity for bacon in American homes.

The popularity of packaged bacon endures. According to a recent report by market research group Mintel, 70 percent of American adults eat it regularly. But is all bacon the same? To see how the classic supermarket bacons measured up, we bought five top-selling products (as assessed by IRI,