Lunch Mate Deli Style Lunchmeats

For a low-inventory store, Aldi has a fairly large lunch meat section. These Lunch Mate Deli Style lunch meats are one of Aldi’s mid-priced lunch meat options.

They were $2.49 for a 9-oz. package at the time of writing. These are Regular Buy products, meaning they are always in stores.

You have a lot of flavors and varieties to pick from here:

• Rotisserie Seasoned Chicken Breast
• Honey Smoked Turkey Breast
• Mesquite Smoked Turkey Breast
• Oven Roasted Turkey Breast
• Smoked Uncured Ham
• Honey Uncured Ham

For this review, we sampled the Rotisserie Seasoned Chicken Breast, Honey Smoked Turkey Breast, Mesquite Smoked Turkey Breast, and Smoked Uncured Ham.

Lunch meat is not the healthiest food. It is highly processed and each serving of this particular lunch meat contains between 13-15% of your daily recommended intake of sodium.

These Lunch Mate Deli Style lunch meats do not contain nitrates or nitrites except for those naturally occurring in celery juice powder, which means they still contain some nitrates and should be eaten in moderation like any other processed meat. The packaging also states the meat contains no artificial preservatives. Preservatives do include potassium lactate, celery juice powder, and/or sodium diacetate.

(If you want to avoid all preservatives and some other things, Aldi’s Never Any! lunch meat line contains no nitrates or nitrites and also has no other preservatives.)

In addition, the Lunch Mate Deli Style lunch meat is made with meat raised with no added hormones or steroids, although this labeling is unnecessary and misleading because federal regulations prohibit the use or hormones and steroids in pork, chicken, and turkey.

One serving is five slices of meat, and the lunch meat we sampled contained between 45-60 calories per serving as well as 0-0.5 grams of saturated fat, 310-350 mg of sodium, and 1-2 grams of sugar.

The Smoked Uncured Ham comes with an additional label noting that it is not preserved and to keep it refrigerated below 40 degrees at all times. It also contains up to 23% of a seasoning solution.

As far as taste goes, my family happily ate all of the lunch meat, taking a lot of it in sandwiches to school or work. It tastes like any other standard lunch meat on the market. I appreciate the variety of meats and flavors in this product line as well. It might be nice if there was a roast beef option as well.

One last small observation is that the packaging is a minor irritation. The packages close with sticky plastic flaps that may not always seal well around all the edges, especially after they’ve been opened and used a few times. I usually stick the packages inside a larger Tupperware-type plastic container with a lid to ensure everything is airtight. Kept in a sealed Tupperware-style container, this lunch meat kept fine for several weeks in my fridge.

The Verdict:

Aldi’s Lunch Mate Deli Style lunch meats come in a variety of flavors and tastes like most other lunch meats from grocery stores. These have their fair share of sodium and are highly processed, so eat them in moderation.