We’re not baked bean snobs in our house. We’ll pick up a tin of whoever’s beans when out shopping to keep the food cupboard stocked up.
Having said that, we did have a favourite brand for a long time, made by the famous pickle people, until we found them to have got too expensive on our weekly shop. And, shock horror, we’ve never been fussed about the biggest name in beans, brought to this country by Henry Heinz in the early 1900s, as we have always found the sauce a bit too sweet for our liking.
Discovering that baked beans are among the food staples to have most increased in price over the past five years, with a reported rise of 70.5 per cent since 2019, according to analysis by savings experts BravoVoucher, we decided to put some own-brand beans to the test.
Choosing the regular beans from the Big Four supermarkets – Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons – as not all offered a basic bean choice, my other half and I took a bit of a scientific approach to one of our regular tea favourites, beans on toast, to see which beans offer the best taste for the best price.
With a helping from each ring-pull can, served onto a half-slice of toasted wholemeal bread, we paid attention to appearance, bean to sauce ratio, consistency of the sauce and, of course, the taste. Here are the results – and no remaining beans were wasted, as I found out they freeze successfully.
(Image: Deborah Hall/Hull Live)
1 Sainsbury’s – 400g, 55p
The label says “tasty tomato sauce”; we found it slightly sweet. The beans looked a bit anaemic on the plate, as the quite runny sauce slid off and pooled beside the toast.
Though all the bean cans were the same size, it was interesting to see on closer examination of the label that the bean content here was the least of our sample tins, and most expensive. Oddly, this product contains the least sugars, when we detected sweetness, and it has the second-highest amount of salt. Overall score: 2/5
2 Morrisons – 410g, 45p
Simply billed as “in tomato sauce”, we found the beans well-coated in a reasonably thick sauce. It wasn’t too sweet and there was a nice tomato-y flavour.
Our verdict was these are perfectly pleasant beans, though the sauce could be thicker. These beans had the highest amount of sugars by some margin, based on a half-can serving, and the most salt. Overall score: 3/5
3 Asda – 410g, 42p
The “full of beans” tag on the label was true to its word. On first opening the tin, the beans were apparent, rather than being that initial layer of sauce. The “rich tomato sauce” claim was also accurate, as this was the thickest of all the sauces and had a nice tomato-y tang to it.
These beans were just second to Sainsbury’s in providing the lowest sugars, and also the lowest in salt of each of the cans. Overall score: 4.5/5
4 Tesco – 420g, 42p
The most beans for your money. There were more beans to sauce than any of the others tested; it was a good, rich sauce (I got the impression of that tasty tomato soup tang) and Tesco is at pains to give you the most description on the front of the label – “best quality haricot beans carefully cooked in a delicately seasoned sauce”.
The beans had the second-highest amount of sugars and second-lowest of salt. Overall score: 4.5/5
