Fairtrade Fortnight – February 27 - March 11, 2012

ONE of the best things about Fairtrade is that you can change the world by eating! And where better to start than the chilled foods aisle of your local supermarket and the delicious Easy Bean one-pot meals.

Easy Bean ready prepared meals are the only range to include products which carry the FAIRTRADE Mark and this pioneering work means the company has helped extend Fairtrade into a whole new area of food shopping. As well as being ethically sourced and hand prepared, the meal pots are multi-award winning and completely natural. Fairness and great taste all in one go.

Easy Bean is now supporting the Fairtrade Fortnight’s 2012 campaign which has the theme ‘Take a step for Fairtrade’.

During Fairtrade Fortnight 2012 the Fairtrade Foundation will host an online stepometer allowing people to register steps taken in support of Fairtrade. There is a target of 1.5 million steps taken throughout the year - one for every Fairtrade producer and worker in the Fairtrade system.

Easy Bean has already taken a major step for Fairtrade by achieving Fairtrade status for two of its delicious ready meal pots - African Palava and New Mexican Chilli - using Fairtrade beans from a co-operative in Inner Mongolia along with other Fairtrade ingredients. Now the company has pledged to start work on switching another of its pots to Fairtrade as part of the 2012 ‘Take a Step’ campaign.

Christina Baskerville, managing director and ‘Bean Maestro’ says: “The FAIRTRADE Mark is our company’s most prized badge of honour. Trading fairly has always been important to Easy Bean. Having worked so closely with farmers in Africa and Latin America who grow the crops and having come from a farming family myself I know how hard the work is and how vital it is that producers receive a fair deal.”

African Palava and New Mexican Chilli pots are available at around 100 of the main Sainsbury’s stores as well as in selected Waitrose stores, Booths, online at Ocado and Sainsbury’s, naturalgrocery.co.uk and many independent stores.

Easy Bean meals are delicious and nutritious - and a great help for time-pressed people who want to vary their diets and still buy Fairtrade.

Easy Bean was established in 2007 by Christina, the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer who has worked in Zambia, the Sudan, Belize and Bolivia, helping to improve farming in those countries.

Christina and her team of five prepare Easy Bean pots at a converted dairy farm near Castle Cary, Somerset and the range is inspired by her work in different countries

Easy Bean promises ‘Lunch on the go or supper in a mo’. The dishes can be simply heated for a quick and tasty lunch or added to rice or a jacket potato for a delicious, healthy evening meal.

The Easy Bean range of dishes: New Mexican Chilli, Moroccan Tagine, Indian Sambar, French Cuisinées, Spanish Puchero and African Palava are the original one-pot hot meals and began what is now roughly estimated as a £40m category.

In her four years of running Easy Bean, Christina has gained six Gold Great Taste Awards – for English Potager, French Cuisinées, Spanish Puchero and African Palava (twice). Her products have been described by Food Magazine as ‘As close to home-cooked as you’ll get in a tub’.

We are very pleased with our recent awards. French Cuisinées achieved a Gold Great Taste Award 2011. Obviously a well liked Easy Bean one-pot as it won a Gold last year too. I happened to notice that it scores well on the Ocado website from consumer comments - 5 stars!

We heard today that our New Mexican Chilli has a silver Taste of the West Award and our African Palava a bronze Taste of the West Award.

We just love the Booths stores and we are proud to be launching into 20 of them TODAY. For the full list of these stores please go to the stockists list on this site. Look out for us in the chill counter - our Moroccan Tagine, New Mexican Chilli and African Palava and in some of them our Spanish Puchero. We look forward to hearing from Booths shoppers via this site, facebook, twitter or email - we would love to hear from you. Photos of Easy Bean on shelf would be greatly received as it is a bit of a drive from Somerset to Lancashire and Cumbria; although I’m planning to be up there in September.

I often receive appreciative emails from people trying our easy beans for the first time. It means alot to us, getting positive feedback and that people take the time to mail in. Here’s a couple that were sent in last week:

Nice comment 1

“Just had my first one-pot meal. I am gluten intolerant, have a dairy allergy and only eat free range meat. What a joy to find a convenience food which I can eat, which is healthy and which is utterly delicious! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!!! It most certainly will not be my last.”

Nice Comment 2

Last week was a big week for the Easy Bean team as three of our one-pot meals are now in more than 100 Sainsbury’s stores and spread across the UK. You can see a list of these stores by going into stockists and dropping down a list. They are currently on an introductory offer.

Three cheers for the Easy bean cooks and able assistants as we’ve been making lots of beans to go into Sainsburys.

Chilli and Palava now with FAIRTRADE Mark

We are so pleased that we have achieved Fairtrade accreditation for two of our one-pot meals - New Mexican Chilli and African Palava. This makes us the first in the UK to get the Fairtrade Mark on prepared food (possibly the World!!!). Our Fairtrade beans are being cultivated by a farmer association in Inner Mongolia. We use a lovely dark red kidney bean for the Chilli and a speckled brown bean for the Palava.

Given that we were putting the Fairtrade mark on the sleeves. We thought it was a good time to take a look at re-freshing the sleeves. We tested out our ideas in store and in the work place. You will see we have flagged up more clearly on the front some key messages and hopefully made it easier to read on the back. Inside you will find lots to read and with colour photos too. Please let us know what you think. We are adding in some interesting beany facts inside our non Fairtrade recipes - if you have any bean facts you’d like to share then we’d love to receive them.

We seem to be doing well with the awards this summer. Our English Potager and French Cuisinées have won Gold Great Taste Awards 2010. And we were thrilled to hear we have been selected as a finalist for the Nestlé Wellness Award; we are presenting to the judges at the beginning of September. The award is for innovation in making healthy food more accessible. Potentially a David & Goliath story as the other finalists are Tesco, Unilever and Birdseye! So wish us luck.

In June 2010, Easy Bean makes it to the headlines of the Western DailyPress ( the biggest local daily  in the Somerset area) and this is what they said about us……

Big benefits of being full of beans

Christina Baskerville, MD and bean maestro at Easy Bean PICTURE: Fran Stothard.

Rose's Jack & the Bean Stalk

Jack and his Easy Bean Stalk

Jack takes third prize at the Queen Camel annual scarecrow competition. Obviously Jack has good taste as he has munched through his fair share of easy beans. His creator Rose, who is a valued Easy Beaner, tells me that prior to Jack and his jolly old bean stalk going on display in their front garden, he was lurking in their cottage and gave Tony her husband a real fright!

Back from the festival and lots to do, not least tend to our young bean plants and draw out our winner of the guess the bean competition. We have sent an email to Annetta Norris but no reply, so we may have to draw out another name.

We promised that we would anounce the correct answers, so here goes:
1. Runner bean
2. Broad bean
3. Borlotti bean
4. Chickpea
5. Pea
6. Lentil

The young bean line up