In mid March of 2024, a social media post started making the rounds claiming that Aldi house-brand Appleton Farms bacon does not come from pigs, alleging that it instead comes from lab-grown cells.
Here’s what one of the posts circulating on Facebook looks like:
Credit: Facebook
And here’s a post from Instagram:
Credit: Instagram
The posts claim (typos and all):
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 company has performed the primary research required to translate cellular agricultural theories and laboratory research into commercially available cellular agricultural products. The company plans on launching commercially viable products by 2022 to 2024. The founder of Appleton Meats Sid Deen says the company is ‘looking at the cell types, the ability to grow them, the expand them and get viable meat out of it’, and wants to serve the Canadian cellular agricultural market before expanding into selling their products in the United States.
This claim is false. Aldi bacon is not grown from cells in a lab.
The confusion seems to come from the fact that the private label Aldi uses for its house-brand pork products is similar to the name of a startup cellular agriculture company.
Here are the facts:
- Appleton Farms is the Aldi house brand for pork and bacon products. This is not a company — Aldi does not operate a place called Appleton Farms. (There actually is a location called Appleton Farms in Massachusetts, but it’s an historical farm run by a nonprofit organization that is not related to Aldi or Aldi products.) Instead, Appleton Farms is just the name Aldi puts on all of its pork products to give them a uniform look, with the products coming from various suppliers all over the United States. Aldi first registered the brand back in 2009.
- Appleton Meats is a Canadian-based, privately funded company researching ways to “scale up the production of clean ground beef” and produce lab-cultivated meat to reduce the need to raise and slaughter animals for food. Appleton Meats was founded in 2017. The LinkedIn page for the founder of Appleton Meats, Sid Deen, states that the company “is a cultivated meat company currently in research and development. The aim is to produce meat which can be obtained without harvesting animals.”
In other words, the Appleton Farms private label associated with Aldi is not the same as the Appleton Meats company out of Canada.
Closing Thoughts:
Aldi Appleton Farms bacon comes from real pigs, not from meat cells cultivated in a lab. The startup cellular agriculture company Appleton Meats does not supply Aldi with meat, nor is Appleton Meats connected with Aldi in any way. Appleton Meats is not connected to the Aldi private label Appleton Farms. The similarity between the names Appleton Farms and Appleton Meats appears to be simply a coincidence.
