Sam Huchinson of Agora says butchery manager Steve Gill, curer Murray O'Sullivan and the team of butchers have been developing the recipe for a year.
They use an old-fashioned brine cure and double-smoke the bacon over manuka so it is dry.
The recipe varies slightly for the streaky and middle bacons.
They use Canterbury pork and aim to get a high-quality product at a good price, he says.
It retails for about $10 for a 350g pack, and is available retail and wholesale at Agora in Mosgiel, Blue Water Products in Dunedin, and Mr Hutchinson expects it to be in good supermarkets soon.
The 100% New Zealand Bacon Competition attracted 73 bacon makers, who entered 184 different bacons.
They were judged cooked and uncooked, on taste, aroma, texture and appearance by 24 culinary professionals headed by president of the National Chefs Association Anita Sarginson.
This year a dry-cured middle bacon category was added to the regular middle, shoulder, streak and middle-eye, because of demand from butchers and consumers.
Hadleigh Smith of New Zealand Pork says about half the entries are from free-range pork and half are from the South Island.
The competition, now in its third year, encourages butchers to improve the standard of their bacon and to use only New Zealand pork.
Seven hundred tonnes of imported pork enters the country each week from Australia, Canada, US and Scandinavia, and is mostly turned into bacon and ham but is not labelled as to origin.
However, New Zealand pork and bacon are now labelled as such.
