Beanz Meanz Marketing Opportunitiez

In perhaps the most exciting food news of the year so far, it was announced this week that a new pop-up cafe will be coming to Selfridges Foodhall later this month. But not just any old pop-up cafe. Marking 50 years since the creation of the "Beanz Meanz Heinz" slogan, the Heinz Beanz Cafe will be open daily in the foodhall for a month, serving the world-famous tomatoey legumes alongside crispy bacon, ham hock or scrambled egg for £3 a plate, with cheese, for some reason, being an optional extra. A little pricier than your local greasy spoon, admittedly, but no doubt that won't hold back the punters. There will also be the opportunity to buy some limited edition tins of beans (sorry - beanz) with special labels celebrating and riffing on the famous slogan - Beans Meanz Eggz, Beanz Meanz Spudz, Beanz Meanz Brekkiez and so on, at £2 a pop. Quite why "Beanz Meanz Chatz", I am not sure. I suspect "Beanz Means Fartz" probably won't be available.

Most excitingly of all, 50 bean loverz willl be able to get their handz on a collectable tin signed by Maurice Drake, the advertising executive who came up with the slogan in 1967. He later claimed that it was "written over two pints of beer in The Victoria pub in Mornington Crescent". Considering it's still being used 50 years on, that's pretty good going for an afternoon's work in the local boozer. £10 for one of these collectables will seem ridiculous to some - it's a tin of beans, after all - but you can bet they'll be being resold on eBay for several times that soon after.

Not sure if I will be investing, but I will certainly try to make it along to Selfridges at some point - the cafe will be there from 27th March to 23rd April, open between 9am and 7pm Monday to Saturday, and 11.30am to 6pm on Sundays.

It's a shame in a way that it's being held at Selfridges and not Fortnum and Mason, as the latter establishment already has a place in Heinz Beanz History. It was the very first place in the UK where tins of Heinz Baked Beans were sold, after Henry Heinz brought his product over from the States in 1901. Back then, like most tinned foods, they were considered quite a luxury item, imported from across the pond at signficant cost, and hence available only to those with sufficient cash to shop in such a high-end shop. But the popularity of the product started to grow, and by the 1920s Heinz Beans were being made and canned over here as well, allowing them to become far more widely available, well-known and loved across the country. It is said that the reason Heinz tins have their distincitve blue-green coloured labels is as a homage to the Fortnum and Mason livery.

Gregg and Beans

I learnt all this from a television documentary that aired on the BBC last year (meant to tell you about it sooner, sorry) called Inside the Factory, in which Gregg "The Egg" Wallace (the shouty judge from MasterChef) visits different factories around the country to see how well-known products are made. He wanders around the machinery and conveyor belts, gawping with amazement as factory employees explain to him the high-tech and huge scale processes that go on to make raw materials into products such as Walkers crisps, New Balance shoes, Brompton bikes, or in this episode, Heinz Beanz, produced at the company's plant in Wigan. He's the perfect host for the show, of course, as the factories are generally pretty noisy, so they need someone who's used to shouting. Other things learned from the episode:

• The UK is the biggest consumer of baked beans in the world (Australia comes second), munching through 2 million cans a day.
• The Heinz factory in Wigan is the largest food factory in Europe, covering 54 acres and producing over 200 products.
• 3 million cans of beans come out of the factory every day, to be shipped around Britain and the world.
• Every week, 1000 tonnes of dried haricot beans are shipped from North America to Liverpool, and then delivered to the factory in huge bags, where they are blanched in steam to rehydrate them.
• Each bean goes on a mile-and-a-half journey through the factory from its arrival to when it leaves sealed in a tin. The beans that make the grade, that is - early on in the process, a sorting machine sifts through every single bean with a laser, firing out jets of air to flick out any discoloured ones.
•  The recipe for the tomato sauce is classified, known by only two people and apparently unchanged since 1896. The mix of spices arrive at the factory as three different, highly concentrated powders. The factory workers know how much of each powder to add to their batches of tomato sauce, but not their composition.
• The factory makes its own tins, turning 168 tonnes of steel into 5 million cans each day. 
• It is the ripples in a tin can that give it its strength - a flat cyclinder of steel is in fact not very strong at all.
• Each tin contains approximately 465 beans, as well as just under 5 teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt in the sauce.
• The beans are not cooked until they are sealed inside the tin. The tins are fed into vast, rotating cyclindrical pressure cookers which cook them at high temperature for 21 minutes.

This section of the factory looks a bit like a set from Blade Runner.

• Every tin is photographed and checked by a machine, to ensure that the label has been applied correctly. Another machine checks that the bottoms of the tins are not bulged, which would indicate that the vacuum of the tin had been broken and hence impurities could get in.
• The storage facility at the factory is the largest of its kind in the UK, with room for around 70,000 pallets. The vast warehouse itself is not heated, yet is incredibly warm inside, due to the remaining heat in the tins and other products from having just been cooked.

The programme also gave some of the history of tins, which was developed as a method of preserving food during the Napoleonic wars, and would go on to save the lives of thousands of soldiers and sailors who previously had been dying of malnutrition. To prove what an effective method canning is, the presenters also visited the Health and Life Sciences Department at the University of Coventry to run some tests on tins, and found that a tin of tomatoes contains exactly the same levels of Vitamin C as fresh. They also opened up a 40-year old tin of skippers and found that the fish showed no signs of bacterial growth and as such was still - technically - perfectly safe to eat.

Finally, in an attempt to challenge the notion that tinned food is inferior to fresh, they enlisted the help of chef and blogger Jack Monroe (who found fame devising ultra-cheap recipes to feed herself and her son while living on the breadline) to cook a meal for a panel of discerning "foodies" using only tinned food. Her fishcakes made with tinned potatoes and sardines cost just 17p a serving, the potatoes actually being cheaper than fresh ones at 30p a kilo compared to 70p, and all the peeling and cooking is already done. A curry containing tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, spinach and peaches cost 27p per head; both dishes were huge hits with the panel, who seemed quite shocked (but thankfully not disgusted) when it was revealed what had been used to make their lunch. Had they used the 1970s tin of skippers, I think there might have been more complaints.

So all in all, a fascinating programme, and one which will hopefully have shown the joy of tins to a wider audience!