Tender Belly
Our commitment to quality starts with our Heritage Hogs, meaning hogs with good genes from long, documented bloodlines.
Our bacon comes from the ultra-tender bellies of Heritage breed hogs and gets its standout flavor from our signature dry rub that co-founder Erik perfected using his culinary background and the highest-quality, freshest ingredients possible. We slow-cure our bacon, and we mean slow. We give it a full 12 days to absorb the exceptional flavor of the dry rub. Of course, we can’t tell you everything that goes in it, but we’ll tell you why it’s so delicious.
About the Brand
Founded by Shannon and Erik Duffy, two brothers from Iowa, our benchmark for taste and quality is re-setting the industry standard. We believe there’s a better way to bacon. Our obsession with quality goes beyond our final product to the lives our hogs live and how they’re treated. It’s at the core of our quality promise. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it results in the best tasting pork money can buy.
We invest in ingredients that meet the insanely high standards we set for our meats. But most importantly, we take our time. We believe that’s the one thing that sets our pork apart from the rest. Giving our hogs time to mature, taking our time searching for the best ingredients we can find, and allowing our bacon to dry cure for two weeks and smoking it for eight hours. That’s some serious patience and it’s the key to the finest pork that’ll ever grace your mouth. Tender Belly pushes the limits on premium pork and creates amazing products under a brand known for being ‘Certified Awesome.’ We make every effort to be environmentally conscious; choosing farms close to processing plants to cut down unnecessary transportation, promoting feed that is good for the environment, along with insulated, biodegradable wrapping, making sure everything is sourced with care.
We’re on a mission to craft the most crazy tasty bacon on planet earth.
Certified Products
FAQ
- Share our insanely high standards for quality and want to be a supplier to Tender Belly? Send us an email to info@tenderbelly.com and we’ll connect you to our purchasing team to determine if we have any needs.
- We’d love to sell Tender Belly at your local grocery story. If you can’t find us on our Where to Buy page, and you want your local store to carry us, chances are they could make a special order for you. Ask the store manager the next time you’re grocery shopping and can’t find us. To get them to carry us on a regular basis takes a little more work, but we are actively contacting grocery and retail buyers asking them to carry our Certified Awesome products. Spread the word and hopefully you’ll see us in your local store soon.
- Curing is a process used to preserve food. It also can add flavor. Curing can be done by smoking meat or packing them with salt. A combination of salt, sugar, and other flavors tastes better though. Cured bacon is preserved with a preparation of salt and sodium nitrites. Nitrites are additives that are responsible for giving bacon its pink color. Uncured bacon is bacon that hasn’t been cured with sodium nitrites. Usually, it’s cured with a form celery powder, which contains natural nitrites, and plain old sea salt. Uncured bacon has to be labeled: Uncured bacon. No nitrates or nitrites added. So — our products still have nitrates and nitrites which help preserve the meat but they are derived from natural ingredients.
- Our cured bacon has a shelf life of 90 days from pack date fresh and 360 days frozen. Our uncured bacon has a shelf life of 60 days from pack date fresh and 360 days frozen.
- Tender Belly is not organic. But, we are always focused on doing things better. We pay serious attention to where food is raised or grown and how it’s processed. From our pork itself to the other spices and ingredients we use to create our premium products, we make sure everything is sourced with care. We make every effort to be humane and environmentally conscious. We choose farms close to our processing plants to cut down on unnecessary transportation. We promote feed that is good for the environment, much of which comes from the same farmers that raise our hogs.
- We can ship fresh when it is requested but otherwise it is frozen.