outside the labs

Best Spiral Hams From Popular Brands

Our tasters cooked and evaluated spiral hams from Aldi, Appleton Farms, Costco’s Kirkland Signature, HoneyBaked, and Target's Market Pantry

Ginger Cowles, Consumer Reports
Managing Editor, Home & Trends.

By Ginger Cowles
Managing Editor, Home & Trends

Updated by Daphne Yao

Updated April 29, 2024

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Member’s Mark (Sam’s Club) Boneless Spiral Brown Sugar Glazed Ham, Market Pantry Hickory Smoked Spiral-Cut Bone-In Ham, Kirkland (Costco) Applewood Smoked Spiral Sliced Ham (Bone-In), The HoneyBaked Ham Company Half Ham (Boneless), and Appleton Farms Spiral Cut Double-Glazed Ham (Bone-In) — After identifying the most widely sold brands of spiral-sliced hams, we evaluated five in our test kitchens.

Hams have been a holiday meal centerpiece for generations, whether for Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or another special occasion. For many families, a spiral-sliced ham became the only choice after Harry Hoenselaar, the founder of HoneyBaked Ham, invented the slicing technique in 1930s Detroit. Lovers of sweet, salty, sliced pork have been indulging ever since.

In this article

Best Spiral Hams
How We Evaluated Spiral Hams
Is Spiral Ham Good for You?

But all that succulent pork can be expensive. HoneyBaked Ham’s 7-pound bone-in ham is priced at $100, while a boneless 3-pounder is $80. So we wanted to find out whether spending that much was really worth it. Our roster included a HoneyBaked ham, an Aldi exclusive, as well as hams from Costco, Sam’s Club, and Target store brands. In our test kitchen, we removed all brand and flavor identifications, cooked the hams, and asked tasters to rank the five hams from favorite to least favorite.

As it turns out, our tasters found the least expensive option to be better than a ham that costs eight times the price. Read on for our thoughts on all five hams, ordered from best to worst in taste and appearance.

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Ginger Cowles

Ginger Cowles has been the managing editor of audience growth at Consumer Reports since 2021, focusing on evaluating products and getting to the bottom of social media “hacks” and trends. Previously, she was an editor at The Spruce, Tronc, Microsoft, and Apple. Ginger is a shoe and bag enthusiast who can often be found at sample sales in New York City.