Castle Wood Reserve Lunch Meat

Sandwiches are common fare for my family. We pack them in school and work lunches. We eat them on camping trips and road trips. Some of us make them for lunch or a snack at home.

We eat a variety of sandwich fillings, including PB & J or PB & honey, homemade egg salad, store-bought chicken salad or homemade chicken salad, or homemade tuna salad. We also buy lunch meat to make our own deli sandwiches. I’ve tried a variety of lunch meats from Aldi over the years, with some options or brands coming and going from the store shelves over time. I used to frequently purchase the Never Any! brand of Aldi lunch meat, but it’s been hard or impossible to find it recently.

One lunch meat brand I’ve been regularly purchasing at Aldi for at least the past year is the Castle Wood Reserve brand. While Aldi is known for stocking mostly private labels, Castle Wood Reserve is not an Aldi private label. It’s distributed by Cargill Meat Solution Corp., a large global food corporation based out of the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cargill has drawn its share of criticism through the years for various issues, but they supply more than 20% of the U.S. domestic meat market, so you’ll find their products in a lot of places.

Castle Wood Reserve lunch meat cost $5.49 for a 16-ounce package at Aldi at the time of publication. Aldi carries it in three varieties: uncured honey ham, smoked uncured ham, and oven roasted chicken breast.

These are Regular Buys, so you should be able to find them at Aldi any time of year. They’re sold in the refrigerated aisle with other deli meats and cheeses. Naturally, you’ll need to keep these refrigerated.

Because these are not an Aldi-exclusive brand, you might be able to find them at other retailers. While the Castle Wood Reserve website’s “Where to Buy” page only shows Aldi stores in my area, I did a Google search that gave listings for Castle Wood Reserve lunch meats at Sam’s Club and at Kroger. If you buy this at Kroger, you may pay twice the Aldi price.

I was initially drawn toward purchasing this brand when I could no longer find the Never Any! lunch meat at Aldi. That had been a lunch meat line that tried to avoid a lot of common preservatives and seemed like a healthier lunch meat option.

The Castle Wood Reserve lunch meat has some of those more appealing characteristics: no nitrates or nitrites added (except for those naturally occurring in celery powder), no artificial colors or flavors, and they’re made with whole muscle cuts or whole chicken breasts.

The packages describe these as “ultra premium” and “artfully crafted.” These lunch meats feel more upscale than cheaper deli options out there, and apparently the Castle Wood Reserve line has seen growth during the last several years when people were making lunch at home more often and they wanted quality meat cuts similar to what they might buy at a sub shop.

These are nice lunch meats. They’re good in everything from traditional cold sandwiches to baked sliders, or even sliced in salads or baked into homemade Hot Pocket-style sandwiches. The packages are large, with a lot of meat, so they’re also good for feeding a family, and I rarely worry about running out of lunch meat if I pack these in one of our coolers on a road trip or vacation. If you aren’t feeding a family and won’t go through a package of this lunch meat quickly, you can divide and free portions to use later.

We like both types of Castle Wood Reserve ham Aldi sells. The chicken is my least favorite, as it tastes a little more bland to me, but other family members prefer the chicken over the ham, so personal tastes may vary.

I do wish Aldi would carry a few more varieties of this lunch meat, including a roast beef version I saw on Castle Wood Reserve’s website.

Keep reading for more information about each variety Aldi stocks.

Castle Wood Reserve Uncured Honey Ham

Castle Wood Reserve Uncured Honey Ham nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

One 2-ounce serving has 70 calories, (15 calories from fat), 1.5 grams of total fat (2% DV), no saturated fat, 25 mg of cholesterol (8% DV), 580 mg of sodium (24% DV), 4 grams of total carbohydrates (1% DV), no dietary fiber, 3 grams of sugars, and 9 grams of protein.

Ingredients are pork, water, honey, sugar, and less than 2% of salt, vinegar, natural flavor (including celery powder), and sodium phosphate.

Castle Wood Reserve Smoked Uncured Ham

Castle Wood Reserve Smoked Uncured Ham nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

One 2-ounce serving has 60 calories (15 calories from fat), 2 grams of total fat (3% DV), 0.5 grams of saturated fat (3% DV), 25 mg of cholesterol (9% DV), 570 mg of sodium (24% DV), 1 gram of total carbohydrates (0% DV), no dietary fiber, 1 gram of sugars, and 9 grams of protein.

Ingredients are pork, water, and less than 2% of salt, sugar, vinegar, natural flavor (including celery powder), and sodium phosphate.

Castle Wood Reserve Oven Roasted Chicken Breast

Castle Wood Reserve Oven Roasted Chicken Breast nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

One 2-ounce serving has 60 calories (10 calories from fat), 1.5 grams of total fat (2% DV), no saturated fat (but the label says it has 2% of your daily value of saturated fat, which, unless I’m misunderstanding it, looks like a typo of some sort), 35 mg of cholesterol (11% DV), 600 mg of sodium (25% DV), 1 gram of total carbohydrates (0% DV), no dietary fiber, 1 gram of sugar, and 10 grams of protein.

Ingredients are chicken breast, chicken broth, and less than 2% of salt, sugar, vinegar, and sodium phosphate.

The Verdict:

Castle Wood Reserve lunch meat is not exclusive to Aldi, but the price at Aldi is lower than any other retailer I’ve seen it at so far. Aldi stocks it in three different varieties: oven roasted chicken breast, uncured honey ham, and smoked uncured ham. I like that these are made using whole muscle cuts of meat or whole chicken breast. They’re a more premium type of lunch meat, so if you’re looking for something to make a sandwich shop-quality lunch, these are well worth trying.