What we found

Wet and dry

Looking for bacon that’ll crisp up? Colonial Dry Cure, Home Brand and Hellers Sensational all had less than 5 percent added water. Four other brands are also worth trying – their added water was between 5 and 10 percent (see the Test results).

Pams Smoked had 16 percent added water and was the wettest bacon in our test.

Some ham was even more waterlogged. The best (Verkerks Classic Leg Ham and Beehive Shaved Champagne Ham) had 10 percent or less added water. But all brands of “sandwich ham” had more than 20 percent added water. Hobson’s Choice was the wettest of the wet – it was 50 percent added water!

The quantity of added water in bacon isn’t always linked to price. Home Brand bacon was one of the cheapest in our test but only had 3 percent added water. But it’s a different story for ham – the cheaper products generally had more added water.

Tip: The water in packaged ham creates a moist bacteria-loving environment. Store ham in the fridge and don’t keep it for more than a few days. If it’s slimy throw it out.

Why so much water?

Much of it’s because of short cuts in the brining and curing process. Bacon is salted or cured pork meat. Traditionally, the pork either had a mix of dry salt and sodium nitrite rubbed into it or it was soaked in brine. This could take several weeks. After, the bacon was smoked over a wood-fire. Old-fashioned ham was done in a similar way.

Today it’s more common to fast-track the process, saving the manufacturer time and money. Brine is still used but it’s injected into the meat through needles. The bacon or ham is ready in a matter of days. And rather than being smoked over a fire, some bacons have “smoked” flavour added to the brine.

Dry-cured bacon is a combination of modern and traditional methods. The dry-cured approach involves rubbing salt, and sometimes sugar or honey, into the meat. There’s no injection of brine and no added water.

Inaccurate labels

We checked how accurate the nutrition information panels were for protein content. Natural variation is inevitable in products like bacon and ham, so we allowed protein content to vary by up to 20 percent from what was on the label.

Even then we found four products (Home Brand Middle Rashers, Beehive Smoked Middle Bacon, Pams Smoked Middle Bacon and Goulds Sandwich Ham) whose protein was beyond our 20 percent tolerance. Goulds said it was reviewing its nutrition information and this product would be a priority.

We also spot-tested the fat content of five bacon products. Three of the five products had at least 20 percent more fat than what was claimed on the label.

Some manufacturers of bacon and ham products clearly need to look at their quality-control procedures and make sure their labels are more accurate. We’ll be following up this issue with the New Zealand Food Safety Authority.

A problem is that the Food Standards Code requires nutrition information to be based on “average values”. This allows the levels of fat, sodium, sugar, carbs and energy in a batch of products to fluctuate around an average level – so any one batch might be 20 percent over the average and another batch 20 percent under (and each individual product in the batch could be wildly above or below).

We’d like maximum and minimum values introduced as well. These would tell manufacturers the upper and lower limits for each individual product and consumers would have more certainty about what they were buying. In the past we’ve found products with double the amount of sodium compared with what was claimed on the label – this would no longer happen.