Easybean

Take a step for Fairtrade by choosing Easy Bean, the original and tastiest one-pot meal

pulses — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:14:35 +0000

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’.

Three Nice Awards for Easy Bean 2011

pulses — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:06:30 +0000

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.

Launch into Booths TODAY!

pulses — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:11:37 +0000

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.

SOME NICE COMMENTS FROM OUR BEAN LOVERS

pulses — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:39:15 +0000

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

It’s not very often I take the trouble to write to complain or say well done about a product. But felt moved on this occasion to send a big congratulations for a fab product. I mostly cook from scratch and don’t generally eat or enjoy ready meals. I tried your Moroccan Tagine expecting it to be like similar pot-type products (I don’t mean pot noodle!!) which are usually a let down and are often thin in texture, cloying and ’shiny’ on the palate, if that makes sense, with a weak flavour, unsatisfying and with a horrid aftertaste.

What a surprise. The texture is fab, really chunky so I can (almost) believe it might contain 3 of my 5 a day, plus it feels substantial and satisfying, the flavour is absolutely spot-on, with just the right amount of seasoning, it’s delicious and the after-taste is reminding me I’ll buy it again.

So thanks again from the Easy Bean team - keep sending us your nice comments!

NEW INTO SAINSBURYS from 18 May

pulses — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:34:18 +0000

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.

Our launch of the first FAIRTRADE prepared meals in the UK!

pulses — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:15:10 +0000

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.

Two Golds for our Seasonal Pots

pulses — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:03:23 +0000

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.

Easy Bean Hits The Local Headlines

pulses — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:22:17 +0000

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.

It is, declares Christina Baskerville, one of our great British dietary contradictions.

We are the world’s greatest consumers of the baked bean.

Yet, when it comes to consuming other similarly healthy pulses, we have scant knowledge or regard for them.

She may, though, be helping to change that attitude, thanks to her one-pot meals created in Somerset that are now available at a supermarket near you.

You may have already seen Christina’s Easy Bean meals on the shelves of Waitrose and John Lewis food halls.

They are certainly catching on and the fact that one of the nation’s most prominent supermarket names has seen fit to stock them has given the product a truly hefty endorsement.

“Easy Bean began in 2007 but before that I had done a lot of market research and got the name and identity established,” said Christina.

“I used the Farmers Market in Bristol for research, by trying to reach an urban audience, targeting the young professional who wants to eat healthily.”

The bean-based one-pot comes in various recipes, such as Moroccan tagine, Indian sambar and New Mexican chilli. Chickpeas, butter beans, red and brown beans all feature.

The pots are designed to be heated in the microwave.

The recipes, says the company, “elevate the humble pulse to superfood status.”

“They are for eating, predominantly, at lunchtime, though it can also be a supper,” Christina adds.

It’s been a reasonably swift upward climb to success for Easy Bean.

They launched in 2007 at a London food fair and by 2008 had done enough to get their first listing from Waitrose, selling in their convenience stores.

“We have done very well and now we’re in the main Waitrose ones”

Locally you can find them at Waitrose in Bath, Weston-Super-Mare, Crewkerne, Poole, Salisbury, and Ringwood from mid-June.

Easy Bean’s base is South Barrow near Yeovil in South Somerset.

Christina has been there for a while, though. She said: “I came down to the West Country at the beginning of the 1990s and got involved in a speciality meat business called Barrow Boar, one of the first to be selling wild boar meat in the UK.

“I settled and sold the company after seven years and went off to work for a cheese company as commercial manager.

“I used to work in tropical agricultural in Central and South America and Africa. That is where the ‘bean maestro’ title comes from. I have worked with legumes and pulses in the Tropics, where they are exceedingly important as they put nitrogen back into the soil.”

Home for the 52-year-old is some nine miles away near Sherborne and the business employs a staff of five, some part-time, some freelance.

“One of our hopes is that we encourage the consumer to get more informed about beans, what they look like, where they come from.

“Without knowing it we are already a nation of bean lovers (we are the world’s largest consumer of baked beans) – they just don’t realise they are pulses. It’s ironic, as they came from America where they don’t eat them.”

Easy Bean, she says, is “pretty ambitious and keen not to let some of the people who have copied the idea try and steal the show.

“We think what we make has a lot of advantages.

“Ours have a distinctive home- made quality and they are made in low batches _ with low fat, high fibre, no salt and all gluten free.”

Each pot also provides two to three portions of our five-a-day fruit and vegetables requirement.

Jack & the Bean Stalk

pulses — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:30:47 +0000

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!

Guess the bean at the Real Food Festival

pulses — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:59:59 +0000

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