Is International Bacon Day always in September?

Not always. The organisers hold it on the Saturday before US Labor Day, so in 2026 it falls on Saturday, September 5, but in years when Labor Day comes very early the Saturday before it lands in late August instead.

Is International Bacon Day the same as National Bacon Day?

No, they are two different observances. National Bacon Day is kept on December 30 each year, while International Bacon Day moves with Labor Day weekend.

Does turkey bacon count on International Bacon Day?

The organisers said so themselves, writing that the day is open to everyone and suggesting turkey bacon for anyone who does not eat pork. US labelling rules treat it as a real product too, provided the pack carries a descriptive name such as Turkey Bacon, Cured Turkey Thigh Meat.

International Bacon Day

Next celebratedSaturday, September 4, 2027

International Bacon Day lands on the Saturday before the long weekend, when there is time to cook something properly. Start a pan early, keep going past breakfast, and let the bacon end up somewhere it has no business being.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEFirst Saturday in September

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYMeat

ORIGIN

Individual Initiative

FOUNDING ENTITY

Seth Rittenhouse

FIRST OBSERVED

2004

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The one weekend three friends could all cook.

International Bacon Day began in January 2004 among three graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Alexa Halford has said Seth Rittenhouse was the one who proposed it. The organisers' own site records the first annual Bacon Day in 2005, and Halford told TODAY that Labor Day weekend was the only time of year the group could get together and cook, which is why the day sits on the Saturday before it.

Read the organisers' own sitevia International Bacon Day blog

INTRO

Bacon is the cured meat with its own rulebook

Bacon once had a frying temperature written into the federal meat regulations. Any bacon tested for nitrosamines had to go into the pan at 340 degrees Fahrenheit for three minutes on each side. That instruction sat in the rules from 1978 until the Food Safety and Inspection Service struck it out on 1 July 2025, calling the programme behind it obsolete.

International Bacon Day lands on the Saturday before US Labor Day, which in 2026 means Saturday, September 5. It is not the same day as National Bacon Day, which falls on December 30.

Underneath the party sits a piece of meat with a surprisingly heavy paper trail. The federal rules cap what a finished slab may weigh, ban one curing salt outright, and require a second chemical to keep another one in check. None of that is on the front of the pack.

DEALS & OFFERS

2026’s deals have wrapped

See who celebrated this year, and browse offers from past years.

Offers wrapped for 2026

International Bacon Day ran on September 5. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.

1 brand offered a deal this year

Norfolk Tides

See past offers

ORIGINS

International Bacon Day history

CHAPTER 01

The scare that rewrote the cure

Nitrite gives bacon its pink colour and its cured flavour, and works with the salt to keep it. It also reacts with amines in the meat to form nitrosamines when the bacon is cooked. In 1978 the Department of Agriculture answered with a testing programme for pumped bacon.

The programme ran for two decades and turned up almost nothing. FSIS screened pumped bacon 174 times between 1994 and 1998, nine samples came back presumptively positive, and one was confirmed. Sampling stopped on 23 October 1998.

CHAPTER 02

The decade bacon lost

Meanwhile the pork industry was walking away from the belly. Its Pork. The Other White Meat campaign launched in 1987 to sell lean cuts and shake off a reputation for fat.

It worked, and the belly paid for it. Stephen Gerike of the National Pork Board later told Bloomberg Businessweek that the parts of the pig that were not white middle meat suffered in that period, and that bacon was the big victim. Bellies piled up in cold storage and prices sank as low as 19 cents a pound.

CHAPTER 03

Bought back one sandwich at a time

The recovery came through restaurant menus. Hardee's launched the Frisco Burger in 1992, a line of sandwiches built on bacon, and a retired Pork Board marketing head called it the first time a chain put bacon on everything.

The board then funded research into precooked bacon that would not fill a kitchen with grease, and paid for recipe development at the chains. One estimate given to Bloomberg Businessweek puts that spending at a few hundred thousand dollars across a decade. A Pork Board marketer dates the turn to around 2000, when bacon became the third condiment behind salt and pepper.

CHAPTER 04

A Boulder kitchen picks a Saturday

International Bacon Day arrived in the middle of that. The organisers say the first annual Bacon Day was held in 2005, cooked in Boulder, Colorado by graduate students who signed themselves Alexa and the Bacon Boys.

In January 2008 they opened a blog so other people could run their own parties, and the day stopped being theirs alone. Within two years they were keeping a running list of celebrations abroad and taking questions on Chicago radio.

TIMELINE

Timeline

USDA starts testing bacon

The Department of Agriculture codifies a sampling and testing programme for nitrosamines in pumped bacon, published at 43 FR 20992.

Pork goes lean

The Other White Meat campaign launches, aimed at dispelling pork's reputation as a fatty protein. Lean cuts sell; the belly does not.

Hardee's builds a burger on it

The Frisco Burger arrives as a line of sandwiches featuring bacon, and other chains spend the decade trying limited-time versions of the same idea.

The first annual Bacon Day

By the organisers' own account, the first annual Bacon Day is held, cooked by graduate students in Boulder, Colorado.

The day gets a blog

On 20 January the organisers start posting recipes, party plans and a photo of the week, and begin collecting reports from strangers.

The frying rule is deleted

FSIS removes the pumped bacon sampling regulations on 1 July, keeping the nitrate ban and the nitrite limit that made the testing unnecessary.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love International Bacon Day

Cure

Nitrite is not an additive you can simply subtract.

Sodium nitrite is doing several jobs at once. FSIS credits it with the pink colour of cured bacon, with greatly delaying the development of Clostridium botulinum toxin, with building the cured flavour, and with holding off rancidity in storage. So the rules cap how much goes in and require a curing accelerator alongside it, rather than taking it out.

Language

The word on the pack is a claim about anatomy

Bacon on its own means the cured belly of a hog. Anything else has to say so: meat from another part of the carcass must be named for it, and other species need a descriptive name such as Beef Bacon, Cured and Smoked Beef Plate. The label is doing real work, and it is easy to read straight past it.

Open

The day was written to include people who do not eat pork

The organisers set that out on their own welcome page. Bacon Day is open to everyone, they wrote, with fake-con for vegetarians and non-pork bacon for religious objectors. For a day built around one animal, the welcome page says so plainly instead of leaving it to be worked out.

BY THE NUMBERS

International Bacon Day by the Numbers

120 ppm: Nitrite added to pumped bacon
550 ppm: Sodium ascorbate required in pumped bacon
40%: Maximum cooked yield from raw bacon
$6.58: US average retail price, sliced bacon per pound

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about International Bacon Day

The legal definition of bacon is one sentence long

The federal standard of identity, at 9 CFR 319.107, reads in full: the weight of cured pork bellies ready for slicing and labeling as Bacon shall not exceed the weight of the fresh uncured pork bellies. It never sets out what bacon must contain. It says only that the cured slab may not weigh more when it is ready for slicing than the fresh belly did, the figure FSIS calls the green weight.

Nitrate is legal in cured meat, and not in bacon

The additive chart permits nitrate in cured meat products other than bacon, and 9 CFR 424.23 spells out the exception in a single line: nitrates shall not be used in curing bacon. Bacon is written into the rules by name, in both places.

Salt pork starts in the same place and is not bacon

It is generally cut from the hog's belly or side, the same as bacon, and it is salted. FSIS separates the two anyway: salt pork is much fattier and, unlike bacon, it is not smoked. Cooks often blanch or soak it first because it is so salty.

Arkansas bacon has a federal definition and a banned shortcut

Product sold as Arkansas Bacon must come from the pork shoulder blade Boston roast, dry cured with salt, sugar, nitrites and spices, and smoked with natural smoke. It may not be injected or soaked in curing brine, and no artificial or liquid smoke may touch it. Prepared in that manner outside the state, it may still be labelled Arkansas Style Bacon.

Imitation bacon bits answer to a different agency

Bits made from real bacon are inspected by USDA. Soy-based imitation bits are kosher, vegetarian and inspected by the Food and Drug Administration instead. FSIS adds that companies should not be using the term bacon on products not made from pork bellies.

As I recall, Seth was sitting on the couch and said, 'Bacon is delicious, there should be a day dedicated to bacon.'

Alexa Halfordone of the three University of Colorado Boulder graduate students who started the day, speaking to TODAY

GOOD TO KNOW

International Bacon Day Around the World

United Kingdom

Most bacon eaten there is back bacon, also called short back bacon, cut from the loin in the middle of the animal's back. It is a lean, meaty cut with relatively less fat than other cuts, and the fatty belly kind Americans buy has its own name on those shelves: streaky bacon.

Ireland

Back rashers are made from the meat on the back of the pig and turn up on the traditional Irish breakfast plate. The belly cut is sold there as streaky rashers, with long veins of fat running parallel to the rind.

Canada

The lean loin meat Americans call Canadian bacon is simply back bacon in Canada. Canadian bacon there traditionally means something else: unsmoked back bacon, sweet pickle cured and coated in yellow cornmeal. It is also called peameal bacon, after the ground yellow peas once used for that coating.

Italy

Pancetta is Italian streaky bacon, smoked or green, cured in salt and spices and then air dried. The name is a diminutive of pancia, meaning belly.

Germany, the Netherlands, France and Spain

The word changes as you go. FSIS lists speck in Germany, spek in the Netherlands, lard or bacon in France, and tocino or tocineta in Spain.

Wherever anyone wrote in

The organisers kept their own tally. Their masthead records a previous year celebrated in the US, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Switzerland and the UK, and their running list for 2009 added parties in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Brazil and Germany.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate International Bacon Day

Cook the whole day, not just breakfast

The organisers laid out a full menu. Bacon waffles in the morning with more bacon beside them, BLTs at lunch, and a dinner that works as a tasting of everything anyone brought.

ASK

Ask everyone to bring a dish

House rules from the same page: if you are invited to a Bacon Day, bring something to eat that contains bacon, and something to drink. Given how much bacon a crowd gets through, the grill outside is the sensible place to cook it.

PUT

Put on a Kevin Bacon film

Also traditional, and entirely literal. The organisers prescribe showings of Kevin Bacon movies and any other film with a leading role given to a pig.

BUY

Buy a cut you never buy

Look past the usual streaky pack for back bacon, peameal bacon or a piece of pancetta. Cook them side by side and the difference in fat makes the point better than any description does.

TRY

Try a dry-cured slab against a supermarket pack

Dry-cured bacon is rubbed with cure and can hang for up to two weeks, and FSIS puts its higher price down to that processing time and labour. Set it against the mass-produced pumped kind and find out whether you can taste the difference.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know International Bacon Day?

1 / 8

Under US regulations, bacon with no other qualifier comes from which part of the hog?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance, and a Federal Register search returns no documents naming it.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

11sources

9primary records

9independently dated

Primary records

eCFR (National Archives and GPO)current through 2026-09-01

9 CFR 319.107 Bacon

The complete federal standard of identity for bacon, a single sentence capping the weight of cured pork bellies ready for slicing at the weight of the fresh uncured bellies.

View source

eCFR (National Archives and GPO)current through 2026-09-01

9 CFR 424.22 Certain other permitted uses

The bacon-specific curing regime, setting ingoing sodium nitrite at 120 parts per million for pumped and massaged bacon and requiring 550 parts per million of sodium ascorbate or erythorbate alongside it.

View source

eCFR (National Archives and GPO)current through 2026-09-01

9 CFR 424.23 Prohibited uses

The one-line prohibition on nitrates in bacon curing, sitting beside the general additive chart that permits nitrate in cured meat products other than bacon.

View source

Federal Register (USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service)2025-07-01

Removal of Pumped Bacon Sampling Regulations, 90 FR 27973

FSIS's own account of the nitrosamine sampling programme it codified in 1978, the frying method the rules prescribed, the 174 screenings run between 1994 and 1998, the halt to sampling in October 1998, and the deletion of the programme's regulations in 2025.

View source

USDA Food Safety and Inspection ServiceJune 2011

Bacon and Food Safety

The agency's consumer fact sheet on how bacon is defined, cured and labelled, with a glossary distinguishing streaky bacon, British back bacon, Irish back rashers, Canadian bacon, peameal bacon, pancetta, Arkansas bacon and salt pork.

View source

International Bacon Dayfirst post 20 January 2008

International Bacon Day (the organisers' own blog)

The day's own site, carrying its date rule, the traditions it prescribes, the statement that Seth created it and that the first annual Bacon Day was held in 2005, and running lists of celebrations by country.

View source

TODAY2012-09-01

Bring home the bacon for International Bacon Day

A first-hand interview with founder Alexa Halford giving the January 2004 origin, naming her two classmates, quoting the moment the idea was proposed and explaining why the date sits where it does.

View source

National Pork Board (Pork Checkoff)

The Other White Meat Brand

The trade body's own account of launching the Pork. The Other White Meat campaign in 1987 to raise demand for pork and shed its reputation as a fatty protein.

View source

US Bureau of Labor Statisticsseries through July 2026

Average Price Data: Bacon, sliced, per lb. (APU0000704111), US city average

The monthly average retail price of sliced bacon in US cities, the source of the current price on this page.

View source

Additional coverage

Bloomberg Businessweek (via Yahoo Finance)2014-10-07

The bacon boom was not an accident, by David Sax

Reported account of how the pork industry marketed away from bacon in the 1980s and then rebuilt demand through fast food, with on-record interviews from National Pork Board staff and industry figures.

View source

CBS News Philadelphia

National Bacon Day Celebrated Annually On Dec. 30

Newsroom coverage confirming the separate, fixed-date National Bacon Day on December 30, used here only to tell the two observances apart.

View source

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