Baked beans are a fixture in our national diet even though they predominantly hail from across the pond.
The iconic food giant Heinz dishes out over 2.5 million tins of the beloved beans to us Brits daily and churns out around three million in their factories every single day. Revered for their sweet, treacly sauce, baked beans are an essential element of a classic Full English Breakfast, despite their foreign origins.
But here’s the kicker, it seems that most people haven’t got a clue on how these tinned treasures are made. That is, until a revealing video uncovering the ins and outs at the world’s biggest baked bean factory in Wigan, England, took the internet by storm, clocking up viral status.
The expansive 52-acre site peeled back the curtain showing exactly how the leguminous snack – which counts towards one of your five-a-day – is crafted. And the revelation has left some people utterly gobsmacked.
It turns out, Heinz works its magic using North American-grown haricot beans which they then rehydrate. The secret spice mix gets tossed into each tin before a machine squirts in the sauce.
Here’s the mind-boggler: the beans are actually steamed in their sealed cans along with the sauce to seal in the goodness, a process taking round two hours from start to finish before being wrapped up in that familiar blue label we all know and fancy.
Social media – particularly X (formerly known as Twitter) – was set alight with reactions. One user, Lily Crue, confessed her surprise: “I did not know that the beans were cooked in the cans,” meanwhile others were staggered to discover the true nature of haricot beans.
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Another stunned netizen expressed their existential culinary crisis, pondering aloud: “Why is no one speaking about how canned baked beans aren’t actually baked? My life is a lie.”
Earlier this year, scientists celebrated a step closer to British Baked Beans hitting stores – after successfully growing haricots that can cope with the UK’s cold climate. Following 12-years of development, researchers harvested the modified beans in September at a farm in Lincolnshire. They hope the groundbreaking advance will cut food imports.
Andrew Ward, who harvested the beans, branded the achievement as an ‘absolute’ milestone – arguing we import too much food from overseas.
“To be able to produce something that we consume in such great quantities in this country, it’s just unbelievable,” he added. “We have struggled in the past with the varieties that have been available to us and those varieties have come from other countries where the climate’s different to ours.”
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