The Food Foundation and Veg Power have launched a new nationwide campaign to encourage people to eat more beans, lentils and pulses.
The project, backed by almost £1.4m in funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, comes with figures showing just 4% of adults eat enough fibre and only 17% of adults eat their 5 a day.
The campaign, with digital marketing agency Ark, will call on retailers, chefs, manufacturers and wholesalers, as well as community food organisations, to commit to selling more beans.
The campaign aims to highlight that having more beans in diets would have a positive impact on the UK’s dietary health, and that beans have low carbon footprints.
The same organisations ran the Eat Them To Defeat Them and Peas Please campaigns, which have reached 36 million people since 2019, and claim to have led to over 1.1 billion additional portions of veg being sold in the UK.
“Beans should be seen as a hero food for all businesses looking to meet net zero goals and cater to rising consumer demand for healthy, affordable foods, and we are keen to work with businesses to ensure beans are much more appealing and available in the supermarket aisle and when out and about,” said Food Foundation head of food business transformation Rebecca Tobi.
“With rapidly rising levels of diet-related disease in the UK, and the impacts of climate change increasingly being felt, now is the perfect moment for a campaign to boost bean consumption.”
Veg Power CEO Dan Parker said: “At Veg Power we’re dedicated to making healthy, sustainable eating easier so we can’t wait to get started on this campaign to get the UK eating more beans.
“We’ll be contributing our expertise to run the social media and influencer campaign, developing fresh and exciting creative ideas and running a schools’ programme in 750 UK schools to get children eating more beans.”
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