There's an 80% chance the bacon you eat is imported. And you didn't even know.

Most people in New Zealand who eat bacon for breakfast have no idea their bacon isn't from New Zealand. The strange part is the packet is technically telling them. They've just been trained not to read it.

I went looking for this after I'd written about chicken feed, expecting to find another invisible-input story — something tucked inside the supply chain that the label doesn't mention. What I found was bigger than that. With bacon and ham, the entire animal is from somewhere else, and the regulation that's supposed to tell you about it has a hole in it the size of a smallgoods factory.

Here are the numbers.

Sixty-three percent of all pork consumed in New Zealand is imported. For cured pork — bacon, ham, prosciutto, smallgoods — the imported share is over eighty percent. Some industry estimates put it as high as eighty-five percent. The pig you ate in your bacon sandwich this morning, statistically, almost certainly did not live here.

The biggest suppliers are the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Finland, and Australia. Smaller volumes come from Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, China, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Croatia. Spain in particular has been growing fast — over eleven thousand tonnes in 2022, nearly double the year before.

Every one of those major supplier countries — with the single exception of Sweden, which is a small share — uses pig farming practices that are illegal in New Zealand. Sow stalls. Longer farrowing crate periods. Piglet castration without anaesthetic. Some allow ractopamine, a growth promoter banned in over a hundred and sixty countries. New Zealand banned sow stalls in 2016. We then started importing the majority of our pork from countries that hadn't.

Now to the loophole, because this is the bit that genuinely surprised me.

In 2022 New Zealand introduced country-of-origin labelling for fresh and cured pork. Cured pork meant bacon, ham, prosciutto, pancetta. The regulation said: tell the consumer where the pig was raised. Sounds straightforward.

But the legal definition of "cured pork" requires the product to contain at least sixty-six percent whole pieces of pork. Most commercial supermarket bacon — especially the cheap stuff — sits below that threshold. It's been brined, water-injected, formed, sometimes shaped from smaller pieces. Anything below sixty-six percent gets reclassified as "processed pork." And processed pork doesn't have to declare origin. The manufacturer only has to put a New Zealand company name and address on the pack.

So a packet of bacon made entirely from imported pork, cured and packaged in New Zealand, can legally be labelled "Made in New Zealand" with no mention of where the pig actually lived. Same for sausages. Same for marinated pork. Same for salami and most smallgoods.

The phrase to look for, which most people read past without thinking, is Made in New Zealand from local and imported ingredients. On a pork product, that almost always means the pork itself is imported.

The Spinoff's What's Eating Aotearoa team did the work of reading the actual fine print on actual packets. Hellers bacon: made in New Zealand with pork raised in the USA and/or Canada plus other local and imported ingredients. Woolworths home-brand bacon: made in New Zealand from pork raised in any one or more of the following countries: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain plus other local and imported ingredients.

Read that Woolworths one again. Seven possible countries. The pig you're eating could have come from any of them. The label is, technically, informing you of that. It's also telling you the manufacturer doesn't know either, or doesn't have to know, or isn't going to commit.

I've eaten Hellers bacon. Most New Zealanders have. The brand presents itself as New Zealand's butcher. Founder Todd Heller is a fifth-generation butcher whose family came over during the gold rush. The packaging carries family stories. The marketing is unimpeachably Kiwi.

Hellers was sold in 2018 to Adamantem Capital, an Australian private equity firm, which took a majority stake. Todd Heller retains a minority. The company makes some genuinely New Zealand-pork products — including a free-farmed range that's clearly labelled as such, with the pork born and raised here. But the standard supermarket bacon, the one most people pick up without thinking, is made from American and Canadian pork. The label is technically compliant. The brand identity does most of the work the label doesn't have to.

This is the part that connects to a bigger story OFT has been circling for months.

When Wattie's closed its frozen vegetable plants in Hastings and Christchurch, the reason given was that they couldn't compete with cheaper imports — vegetables grown in countries with lower input costs, weaker environmental rules, and labour markets New Zealand doesn't have. The same dynamic, exactly, drives the pork numbers. New Zealand has high animal welfare standards. New Zealand pig farmers operate within those standards. Their cost of production is therefore higher than producers in countries that don't operate within them. Imported pork lands here cheaper. Supermarkets buy the cheaper product. The local industry shrinks. Meanwhile the welfare rules we passed — sow stalls banned, farrowing crate time limited, castration restricted — only apply to the forty percent of pork that's actually produced in New Zealand. The other sixty percent rolls in from countries where those rules don't exist, and the label, in many cases, doesn't have to tell you.

This year a coalition of farmers and animal welfare advocates launched a campaign calling for imports to be held to New Zealand's standards — what they're calling closing the welfare gap. An unusual alliance. The argument is straightforward: if it isn't acceptable to produce something a particular way in New Zealand, it shouldn't be acceptable to import a product made that way and sell it on a New Zealand supermarket shelf. Eighty-three percent of New Zealanders agree, in the polling. Whether the law catches up is a separate question.

The pattern is the same one. New Zealand sets a standard. The standard makes domestic production more expensive. Imports from countries without the standard land cheaper. The standard becomes a competitive disadvantage for the people complying with it, and the products of countries not complying with it are sold to consumers who think they're buying the standard, because the brand says New Zealand and the label says Made in New Zealand and the regulation has a sixty-six percent threshold that most bacon doesn't reach.

So what do you do with this.

Read the fine print. Made in New Zealand from local and imported ingredients is the giveaway. So is the absence of any country-of-origin disclosure on bacon, ham, and smallgoods that don't say New Zealand explicitly. The PigCare label and Born and Raised in New Zealand wording on a pack is a positive signal. So is 100% New Zealand pork — that phrasing has legal weight under the Fair Trading Act. Brands like Holly Bacon in Hawke's Bay and Freedom Farms have been New Zealand pork only for decades, and there are smaller producers around the country who'll tell you exactly which farms their pigs come from if you ask.

The certified organic option for pork in New Zealand is much smaller than for chicken. There isn't a Bostock's-equivalent dominant brand. There are scattered organic and free-farmed producers, mostly small, and the supply doesn't reach most supermarkets. This is, again, the structural shape of the conventional supply chain pulling everything toward the cheapest input.

I'm not done with this. The next questions are the ownership ones — who actually owns the major NZ smallgoods brands now, who imports the pork at wholesale, and where the supermarket house brands sit in all of it. I'll come back to that.

But I wanted to write this part down now. Most New Zealanders, I think, don't know they're eating American or Spanish or Polish pigs. The label, when read carefully, is telling them. The label is also designed not to be read carefully. And that gap — between what the regulation requires and what an ordinary shopper actually sees — is where the whole story sits.