The bacon-season story says belly prices peak in summer: BLT demand, tomato season, restaurant bacon programs running full, all landing on the same weeks. It is the most repeated seasonal in pork, and it deserves the same treatment as any repeated claim: measure it. Here is what ten years of USDA daily prints (2016 through 2025) on the 13-17 pound derind belly, the workhorse commercial spec, actually show.
The premium exists, with an asterisk
Summer (June through September) priced above the year's average in seven of the ten years, by 8.7 percent on average across all ten. When the story works, it works hard: 2023's summer ran 33 percent over that year's mean, 2025 and 2017 both ran about 16 over. But three years (2016, 2019, 2024) printed summers at or below the annual average, and the single highest month of the year landed inside June through September only five times out of ten. Bellies have peaked in February, March, April, and October across the decade. The reason is that bellies are the most storage-driven and volatile cut in pork: freezer inventories, one-off export pulls, and hog supply swings routinely overwhelm the calendar. The summer premium is a lean, not a law, and anyone quoting it as a certainty hasn't run the numbers.
The steadier half is the fade
Like the ribeye's January cliff, the more dependable leg of this seasonal is the exit. November printed below August in seven of the ten years, by 13 percent on average across all ten, and the down years were violent: five of the seven fades exceeded 25 percent. Once retail bacon features rotate off and the summer programs are covered, the belly market has repeatedly shown it can lose a quarter of its value into late fall, and the years it didn't (2016, 2018, 2024) were years when tight freezer stocks or supply disruptions overrode the calendar.
That last clause is the practical lesson: the belly calendar only rules when storage doesn't. The monthly Cold Storage report is the tiebreaker, and it is why the two get read together: a thin freezer going into fall can carry prices through the season where the seasonal says fade, and a heavy freezer in June can smother bacon season before it starts.
The belly series behind these numbers is charted on this site with its five-year seasonal band, the belly-specific freezer stocks sit on the Primal Complex bellies tab next to the price ladder, and the seasonal position card there states where the complex sits against its own calendar with the historical forward record attached. That combination, price against season against storage, is the whole belly read in one place.