The British bacon butty is moving upmarket. Just as sausages have enjoyed a makeover and jumped from midweek supper staple to a gourmet dinner dish, so good bacon is now the choice cut for “foodies”.

Consumer demand for the best quality bacon — dry-cured, maple-cured, traditional Wiltshire-cured, sweet-cured, smoked and unsmoked — has expanded the market by more than 30 per cent in a year.

Sales are now £100 million a year, up on £75 million last year. Even five years ago the market in premium bacon was worth just £30 million.

British people are now eating as much as 16,000 tonnes of top-quality bacon per year, mainly for breakfast but also mixed in pasta sauces or wrapped around chicken or cod fillets.

Once, special cured bacon was found only in traditional butcher’s shops and the best delicatessens. But the biggest supermarket chains have now moved in, following the success of market pioneers such as Denhay in developing a niche market for premium bacon at Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and later Safeway (now Morrisons).

Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference bacon range has grown 51 per cent in a year, Tesco’s Finest bacon is up 34 per cent and Asda’s Extra Special bacon is up 25 per cent.

Meat industry experts say that the reason for the boom is simple: consumers are no longer prepared to eat bacon pumped with so much water it leaves white scum in the pan.

Chris Lamb, the marketing manager at the British Pig Executive, said: “Consumers are no longer satisfied with bog standard bacon that is soft, pappy and fatty. The Meat and Livestock Commission conducted research which showed that most people wanted to cook more meals at home and rely less on ready meals. Time and again the focus groups said they liked bacon but hated the white scum left in the pan.”

He added: “Now Grampian, Tulip and Cranswick, the big three companies, have come up with premium brands for supermarket own labels and have developed their own brands such as Jack Scaife and the Black Farmer. Even Danish producers are now trying to launch a premium dry-cured bacon in the UK.”

This new competition has come as no surprise to Denhay, which cures bacon for the Prince of Wales’s Duchy Originals brands. George Streatfield and his wife, Amanda, have been part of the family business for 30 years. They moved into dry-cured bacon 14 years ago when they discovered that consumers were unhappy with the standard of bacon generally on sale.

Mr Streatfield said: “People were just fed up. The bacon had no flavour and shrank to nothing. They remembered the days of the old grocers when bacon was sliced for you. They remembered the smell in the shop. So we found someone to teach us how to produce a good, dry-cured bacon.”

Fergus Henderson, a chef at the St John restaurant in Clerkenwell, London, agrees. “I am really pleased consumers are now taking interest in the origin of food and are asking for good bacon. We should be celebrating this change. It’s sadly too late to save many traditional butchers but this will help to support those that remain.”

His favourite bacon is from the rare breed Gloucestershire Old Spot pig and he serves their bacon chops on his menu.

“Life without bacon is gloomy. We use bacon a lot. It gives a cheeky element to many dishes.”

Richard Hogg, the marketing director at Duchy Originals, said that demand for premium and organic bacons was strong. Meat for the brand comes from pigs reared in Britain including the organic pigs from Princes Charles’s Home Farm in Gloucestershire.

Slice of history

–– The word bacon, or bacoun, was used until well into the 16th century to refer to all types of pork.
–– It comes from various dialects — French bako, common Germanic bakkon and old Teutonic backe — all of which refer to the back
–– Roman soldiers received a salarium, a ration of salt as part of payment. It was a prized commodity for preserving meat. This is how the word the word “salary” originated
–– Streaky bacon was first recorded in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens in 1838
–– People in Tyne Tees have the biggest appetite for bacon, eating 33 per cent more than average

Sources: Meat and Livestock Commission, British Pig Executive, www.lovebacon.com

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