The Worst Canned Baked Beans Brand Is From One Of The Bougiest Grocery Chains

Usually it's homemade meals that taste the most comforting, but sometimes a meal from a can is what hits the spot. Baked beans are easily one of those exceptions — though delicious when made from scratch (even more so if you follow our slow cooker baked beans recipe), there's something uniquely nostalgic about them when poured from a good ol' can. Don't argue with the logic. Tasting Table sampled 12 brands of canned baked beans to find the best ... and the worst. The latter came as a surprise, since it's sold in one of the priciest grocery store chains: 365 by Whole Foods Market.

The flavor of Organic Baked Beans from Whole Foods is simply lacking. Our taste tester, Crawford Smith, found them to be mild, with the main notes being tangy and acidic, which are odd to detect in a dish that's supposed to be on the sweet side. We would forgive Whole Foods for this oversight, considering the chain offers other variations of baked beans that are supposedly more flavorful — one with maple and onion, and another called Campfire baked beans with added natural flavoring — but both of these versions have plenty of negative reviews from customers. They all claim that there's very little flavor in the beans or that they taste poorly overall. We understand Whole Foods prides itself on selling organic groceries, but must that really mean sacrificing the flavor?

Next to the lackluster flavor, Whole Foods 365 baked beans also have a strange texture. The sauce is so watery that some customers thought it was extra liquid they needed to pour away — turns out, that's just the consistency of the sauce. Knowing how much liquid you should add to baked beans is one of the key parts of making this dish, something Whole Foods didn't take into consideration, it seems. To add insult to injury, the can is nearly half full of just the sauce; the bean content is ridiculously low. The few beans that are in the can, though, are a big disappointment on the texture side, too. They're very hard and chewy, with several customers noting they seem undercooked.

Whole Foods has a reputation for being très pricey, although that has gradually been changing since Amazon took over in 2017. The price for a can of its Organic Baked Beans is around $1.50, which is pretty fair as far as canned goods go. And yet, stiff beans with soupy sauce and little flavor are nobody's idea of a good meal, no matter how affordable the price tag or which one of the creative uses for canned baked beans you're planning to employ. Sorry, Whole Foods, these really are a total miss.