Debunked: Aldi's bacon is not grown in a lab despite conspiracies on social media

Bacon comes from pigs, but some social media users stirred up trouble by claiming that a particular brand sold by Aldi grocery stores is growing the pork product in a lab.

Appleton Farms, Aldi's store-brand bacon, has customers Googling to find out where their meat is coming from.

Instagram user @kennyguidotemprano shared a post on Monday about the bacon being sold by Aldi.

"If you shop at Aldi you need to know that store-brand bacon is not from pig it’s from a growing cell," they wrote. "Appleton Meats is currently a privately funded company exploring multiple cellular agricultural methods for growing ground beef, chicken, and mouse-meat cat treats"

On Tuesday, An Aldi spokesperson told USA TODAY that Appleton Farm bacon products “are not produced through cultivated lab practices.”

What @kennyguidotemprano is referring to is Appleton Meats, a Canadian company not affiliated with Appleton Farms.

"Aldi private label brand and has no affiliation with Appleton Meats," according to Aldi's spokesperson.

Is turkey bacon healthier?The answer may surprise you.

What is Appleton Meats?

Appleton Meats was founded in 2017 and utilizes "cellular agriculture," which involves taking cells from animals and growing them to create milk, eggs, meat and other products, the Canadian Press reported.

“We are looking at the cell types, the ability to grow them, to expand them and to get viable meat out of it,” Sid Deen, the founder and CEO of Appleton Meats, told the Canadian outlet in 2019.

It remains unclear whether Appleton Meats is still in business, but Deen told the Canadian Press that his company would have a viable product for sale within three to five years.

Deen's LinkedIn profile has him still named as director of operations for Appleton Meats in Vancouver, Canada.

"Appleton Meats is a cultivated meat company currently in research and development," according to the company's LinkedIn bio. "The aim is to produce meat which can be obtained without harvesting animals."

Lab-grown meat OK'ed to eat in the US

Lab-grown meat was approved for sale for the first time in the U.S. last year when California-based companies Upside Foods and Good Meat got the OK from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Good Food Institute President Bruce Friedrich called the approval in 2023 a breakthrough and another step toward enabling “the world to diversify protein production while slashing emissions, increasing food security, reducing risks to public health, and freeing up lands and waters for restoration and recovery.”

Meat and plant eaters maybe shouldn't knock lab-grown meat until they try it as it is "almost nutritionally identical to farm- or ranch-raised meat," Dana Hunnes, a clinical registered dietitian at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, told UCLA Health.

"But with cultivated meat, you can adjust the medium in which the living cells are grown to add certain vitamins and nutrients that would alter, and perhaps improve, its nutritional quality," Hunnes said.