New Zealand's Best Bacon and Ham, If You Care How the Pig Lived

Every winner at the 2026 100% New Zealand Bacon and Ham Awards is born and raised here, which already beats the imported pork filling most of the bacon shelf. A few of them are free range or free farmed, the highest welfare you can buy and about as close to organic as New Zealand pork gets. Those are the ones below. One honest catch first, because it matters.

Read this first

Free range tells you how the pig lived. It tells you nothing about what the pig ate. Those are two different questions, and the second one is the one nobody answers on the label.

Here is why that matters. New Zealand grows no GM crops, but it imports a lot of GM feed. In 2017, the most recent year with a clear breakdown, the country brought in about 278,000 tonnes of soybean meal, 98% of it from Argentina, almost all of it genetically modified, and it goes mainly into pig and poultry feed. None of that has to be disclosed. Meat from animals fed GM feed does not have to be labelled here at all. So a pig can live a good outdoor life and still be finished on imported GM soy, and you would never know from the packet.

The only label that reliably rules GM feed out is certified organic, and certified organic New Zealand pork barely exists, just a couple of tiny farms, because organic pork needs organic feed and that does not scale here. We have been through that already.

So this is where the hunt sits right now. Free range is the best welfare we can confirm. The feed is the gap we mostly cannot see into. We will keep digging, and where a producer does tell you, we will say so loudly. For most of the winners below, we could confirm the pig went outside. We could not confirm what it was fed. That is the honest state of play, and we would rather tell you than pretend the label says more than it does.

If you want the full picture of who grows the pork and why so little of it is local, that is the job of The 20%, and the imported-bacon problem is laid out in There's an 80% chance the bacon you eat is imported.

The winners worth buying

Free range means the pig lived outside. Free farmed means no crates or stalls, loose farrowing, growing pigs in straw-bedded barns. Both clear the welfare floor that a plain medal does not. These three won, and raised the pig properly. Feed, as above, we could not confirm.

• Supreme Bacon: Aussie Butcher, New Lynn (Auckland). Reuben's Middle Free Range Bacon. The best bacon in the country this year, and it is free range. Top of the podium and top of the welfare scale in one pack. Start here.
• Harris Farms, Cheviot (North Canterbury). Free farmed, Category Champion for its dry cured middle, with more medals behind it. The clearest proof that welfare and a winning cure sit together.
• Mapari Meats, Mt Wellington (Auckland). Their Free Range Champagne Ham took a medal in the boneless class, and their classic streaky took gold in Naturally Cured. The free-range ham is the one to ask for.

If you only shop the supermarket, Woolworths' Free Farmed ham is the one higher-welfare medallist on those shelves. Free farmed, born and raised here, a silver. Not the best on this page, but the best of what is easy to reach.

Why the big names aren't on our list

Two famous winners are missing on purpose.

The Supreme Ham went to Sam's Butchery in Silverdale, and it is a very good ham from New Zealand pork. But Sam's advertises grass-fed beef, grass-fed lamb and free-range chicken, and says nothing of the sort about its pork, which tells you what it is. The People's Choice, both bacon and ham, went to Pokeno Bacon, whose pork carries no welfare claim either. People's Choice is a public vote won through an online portal, on a butcher's mailing list and social reach. It is a popularity contest, not a welfare one, and no guide to how the pig lived.

Good cured pork, both of them. Just not the point of this piece.

The ones that go further

The strongest free-range pork in the country does not always top these awards, because the awards score the cure. And two of these names do the thing almost nobody else does: they tell you about the feed.

• Woody's Free Range (Levin, delivers nationwide). Gold in 2024 and 2025, 100% born and bred outdoors, with pork from Longbush in the Wairarapa, who are fed a certified GMO-free diet because their export customers demand it. Free range and no GM soy, confirmed, which is as close to organic as this list gets. We followed that bacon back to the pig in Who Is Woody. woodysfarm.co.nz
• Harrington's (free-range smallgoods, in most supermarkets). Their free-range pork is fed grass, hay and non-GMO corn or maize, no growth hormones. Bacon, ham and sausages, widely stocked. harringtonsmallgoods.co.nz
• Harmony (single farm, Timaru). Free range, fully traceable to one property that rotates pigs through pasture to build soil, in supermarket chillers and online. Welfare and provenance are excellent; feed they do not spell out. harmony.co.nz
• Poaka (Aylesbury, near Christchurch). Free range, wild-farmed, heritage breeds, raised and butchered on their own farm. Pasture-forage based, though the GM question on supplementary feed is not addressed on the label. poaka.co.nz

Where this leaves us

Free range is the best welfare you can confirm in New Zealand pork right now, and the winners above are genuinely that. Close to organic, but not organic, and the thing standing between the two is feed: the imported GM soy that quietly fills most livestock rations here, unlabelled, unmentioned, almost impossible to see.

The producers who close that gap can be counted on one hand, and the fact that Woody's and Harrington's manage it proves the rest could if they chose to. Until they do, the question stands. The best bacon in the country this year was free range. Whether the pig that made it ever ate a GM soybean, the label will not say.