Why We Highly Suggest Avoiding Butterball's Turkey Bacon

Many meat-loving foodies would probably tell you to steer clear of turkey bacon altogether. Here at Tasting Table, we've been known to enjoy a good strip or two — so long as it's done well. Not all versions are created equal, and in our ranking of the nine best grocery store turkey bacon brands, Butterball's came in last place.

Turkey bacon is typically made from pieces of the bird that have been seasoned, shaped, and reformed into bacon-like strips, versus pork bacon, which is made from smoked, cured pork belly. Since it's a leaner, less salty meat, turkey bacon tends to be chewier and milder than its pork-based counterpart, regardless of the brand. Opting for poultry over pork doesn't have to (and arguably shouldn't) mean sacrificing quality on taste or texture. Alas, Butterball's version delivers on neither front.

As we mentioned in our review, "The slices were slimy but delicate and thin, tearing easily in the pan when flipped. ... After cooking for the recommended nine minutes, the result was too chewy, more like the consistency of deli bologna." Overall, Butterball's turkey was bland, flavorless, and largely forgettable. What barely-there taste it does have isn't very pleasant, a performance made worse by the fact that it doesn't crisp up and is liable to burn thanks to its paper-thinness. Butterball may be the name turkey-lovers trust for their roasted birds, but the brand should stick to what it does best and leave the bacon realm to the respective pros.

It's worth mentioning that Butterball's turkey bacon might not have always been so lousy. Multiple Walmart reviews from apparent longtime fans propose that there has been a change in the recipe (and not for the better). As one person put it in May 2024, "This has cooked well and tasted good for the past two years. The most recent package I got has cooked entirely differently. The first batch turned into dust at that heat. It looks different and tastes different." A similar review complains, "Definitely changed something In these new batches. Was basically inedible ... the texture was off and it kept [c]urling."

On the note of texture, Butterball's turkey bacon feels low-key too thin to be a strip of bacon. Plus, the wavy edges and uniform coloring make the bacon look and feel pretty unnatural. Elsewhere on the internet, other reviews call the bacon ultra-salty. Instead of bacon's charactersitic umami smokiness, Butterball's lobs on the salt hoping it'll compensate for the lack of savory dimensionality.

When it comes to bacon, sometimes you get what you pay for. At a Walmart in Chicago, a 12-ounce package of original Butterball turkey bacon runs for $4.22 ($0.35 per ounce). Meanwhile, an 8-ounce package of Applegate Naturals Uncured Turkey Bacon (which cinched the first-place spot in our ranking) runs for $8.29 at a Chicago Target ($1.04 per ounce).