Easy Bean, the premium prepared meals company which uniquely features beans in each of its recipes, is launching the first ready prepared meals to carry the FAIRTRADE Mark. The products - African Palava and New Mexican Chilli – will be available at around 100 of the main Sainsbury’s stores as well as in selected Waitrose stores, John Lewis, Ocado and other outlets.

Sainsbury’s will also be launching a third product from Easy Bean - Moroccan Tagine. The full range of six meals is available in Waitrose and Ocado.
Easy Bean was established in 2007 by the ‘Queen of Beans’ Christina Baskerville at her home in Sherborne, Dorset. The range, inspired by her work in different countries around the world, promises ‘Lunch on the go or supper in a mo’. The dishes can be eaten heated up as they are for a quick and tasty lunch or added to rice or a jacket potato for a delicious, healthy evening meal.

Now two of her meals have been granted Fairtrade status:

African Palava This is a delicious West African hotpot and a colourful profusion of Fairtrade brown beans, free range chicken, peanuts, sweet potatoes and spinach. The range of tastes and textures inspired the product’s name – Palava, which in West Africa means talking profusely or a business meeting’ – the word derives from Portuguese, introduced by the slave traders
New Mexican Chilli This includes Fairtrade red beans with sweet peppers, tomatoes, spiked with the jalapeño chilli; a classic combination known to aficionados in the state of New Mexico as a ‘Bowl o’ Red’.

For many in the UK baked beans are the only bean we consume regularly but, with the help of her range of meal pots, Christina wants to teach us to love the full range of beans, peas and lentils which are central and essential to the cuisines of many countries across the world.

Christina and her team of five prepare the food at a converted dairy farm near Castle Cary, Somerset. Her passion for the bean has roots in her childhood as the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer; her agricultural training and her work in Zambia, the Sudan, Belize and Bolivia, helping to improve farming in those countries. She says: “I was excited by the nutritional benefits from beans as well as their ability to fertilise the soil by putting nitrogen back into the soil as they grow. These benefits are vital in countries with levels of malnutrition and where land can be over-worked by smallholders desperate for enough to eat.”

She adds: “Beans have more fibre than many wholegrains, are virtually fat free and are high in protein. In the UK the broad bean was the most important staple in our diets until Sir Walter Raleigh brought Queen Elizabeth 1st the now ubiquitous potato.”

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. “My products win the taste test against competitors every time, says Christina.”

The meals are easy to prepare, microwavable or heated in a pan, having been slowly cooked in one pot, in small batches. Beans and vegetables are infused with herbs and spices, sometimes added to locally sourced meat, all cooked in rich stocks. They are high in fibre, low in fat and salt and also have the benefit of being gluten and dairy free; and furthermore they provide two to three of your 5-a-day
“The FAIRTRADE Mark is our company’s most prized badge of honour,” says Christina. “Trading fairly has always been important to Easy Bean. Having worked so closely with the 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. We would like the rest of our range to receive Fairtrade certification as soon as possible.”