No, Aldi does not sell lab-grown bacon

Claims about bacon sold at Aldi, a discount grocery store chain with locations in 36 states, have gone viral across social media in recent weeks. 

One Facebook post shared more than 5,000 times since March 19 claims that Aldi’s store brand bacon does not come from pigs and is instead grown from cells in a lab. 

“Aldi’s customers: If you shop at Aldi you need to know that store brand bacon is not from pig it’s from a growing cell. Appleton Meats. Appleton Meats is currently a privately funded company exploring multiple cellular agricultural methods for growing ground beef, chicken, and mouse-meat cat treats,” the post reads in part. 

The same text has been shared hundreds of times in several other Facebook posts.

VERIFY reader Jacqueline texted us to ask if claims that Aldi sells lab-grown bacon from Appleton Meats are true.

THE QUESTION

Does Aldi sell lab-grown bacon?

THE SOURCES

• Aldi spokesperson
• Search of products on Aldi website
• Webpage on Appleton Meats from Golden Research Engine, an online database
• 2019 news report published by the Canadian Press
• Crunchbase

THE ANSWER

No, Aldi does not sell lab-grown bacon.

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WHAT WE FOUND

Aldi does not sell lab-grown bacon, a spokesperson for the company said. The chain sells bacon under its brand Appleton Farms, not Appleton Meats. 

A search of Aldi’s website shows the grocery store chain also sells other deli meats, such as salami and prosciutto, under the brand Appleton Farms. The Appleton Farms label also appears in photos attached to the false Facebook posts about Aldi’s bacon.

A spokesperson for the company confirmed to VERIFY that Appleton Farms is an “Aldi private label brand and has no affiliation with Appleton Meats.”

“Our Appleton Farms products are not produced through cultivated lab practices,” the spokesperson added. 

So what led to the confusion online about Aldi’s bacon?

Most of the Facebook post is made up of text copied and pasted from a webpage about Appleton Meats on an online database called the Golden Research Engine.

That webpage says Appleton Meats is a “privately funded company exploring multiple cellular agricultural methods for growing ground beef, chicken, and mouse-meat cat treats.”

“The company has performed the primary research required to translate cellular agricultural theories and laboratory research into commercially available cellular agricultural products,” the webpage reads.

Appleton Meats is a Canadian company that was founded in 2017, the Canadian Press reported in 2019. According to the news outlet, Appleton Meats wanted to “create a beef burger without cows” and was “conducting a lot of primary research that will lead to product development.”

“We are looking at the cell types, the ability to grow them, to expand them and to get viable meat out of it,” Appleton Meats CEO Sid Deen told the Canadian Press.

VERIFY could not find any recent updates on Appleton Meats’ research or product development, as its website appears to have been shut down. Crunchbase, a company that provides information about businesses, also lists Appleton Meats as “closed.”

Lab-grown meat is available in the U.S., but you probably won’t see it on grocery store shelves anytime soon.

VERIFY reported in July 2023 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells for the first time in the United States. That approval gave two California companies, Upside Foods and Good Meat, the green light to sell cultivated or “lab-grown” chicken in the U.S.

However, cultivated chicken is much more expensive than farmed chicken meat and it cannot yet be produced on the scale of traditional meat, according to Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at the University of California Berkeley. Instead, it will be sold exclusively to restaurants for now.