6 Best Canned and Pouched Bean Brands for Camping and Home

Published April 21, 2026 04:00AM

In the 1941 classic Cook It Outdoors, James Beard offers a recipe for baked beans–and a caveat. Beans are, of course, the American outdoor meal par excellence. Cowboy fare. A campsite staple. They are also, Beard makes clear, something of a hassle to cook from scratch. “If you think these are better than the really excellent canned ones now available,” he writes, “and if you think they are worth the trouble, go right ahead.”

The thing is, the canned-bean aisle at the grocery store hasn’t evolved much over the last 85 years–though the public perception of canned foods has, and not for the better. Now, a few upstart companies are hard at work on that image problem.

In some cases, that means ditching the can altogether. Brothers Antonio and Daniel Caballero launched the Fillo’s brand in 2016 with a storefront in Aurora, Illinois, selling three varieties packed in multi-layer laminate pouches: Cuban Black Beans, Panamanian Garbanzos, and Mexican Mayocobas. “Our dad is from Cuba and our mom is from Panama,” says Daniel. “We found that we didn’t have the time to prepare a lot of the foods that we grew up with. And there wasn’t really a convenient solution in the marketplace.”

Whole Foods picked them up in 2017; by 2019, they were in stores nationwide. The pandemic was a watershed moment. By 2021, Fillo’s Cuban Black Beans were the highest-velocity pouched bean in the U.S. Today, Fillo’s sells seven varieties of beans plus pouch-packed tamales and bean-and-grain meals.

All Fillo’s beans begin with a sofrito, the Latin American/Caribbean flavor base of diced aromatics, herbs, and spices cooked gently in extra-virgin olive oil. That very traditional element is actually novel in a canned product: “Not many processors out there are willing to mess with olive oil and fresh vegetables,” says Fred Schlatter, Fillo’s head of business development. The beans cook right in the pouch along with the sofrito. “Short, high-temperature cook cycles mean the beans remain whole and the vegetables aren’t blasted to smithereens,” Schlatter explains.

More pouch pros: “Campers, hikers, and backpackers prefer a pouch,” Schlatter says. “It’s lightweight and easy to pack out.” Though all Fillo’s products come ready to eat, if you want to heat them up, a pouch can go right in the microwave. Pouches are lighter to ship than cans, which reduces the carbon footprint significantly, Schlatter says. But they aren’t recyclable, at least not yet.

That last point is a deal-breaker for Kat Kavner Woolf. When she and Jaime Tulley founded Heyday Canning Co. in 2020, they weighed the pros and cons and felt better about cans from a sustainability standpoint: “Why would we be putting anything in a plastic pouch that’s going to landfill?” There were other reasons, too. “I thought there was something really fun about embracing the can, which has been such a staple in the American pantry for so long,” Woolf says. “It felt like a juicy challenge to try to reimagine it.”

The labels stand out on the supermarket shelf with a bright retro style that winks at the nostalgia of the can while suggesting there is something new on offer inside. And there is. The Kimchi Sesame Navy Beans, for instance, are made with fresh kimchi, garlic, ginger, and toasted sesame oil. The only preservative involved is the heat used to cook the beans and their sauce in the can. I found them for $3.50 per 15-ounce can at one local supermarket–a dollar or two above what the Campbell’s and store-brand beans shelved next to them were selling for. “You just can’t make something truly delicious from quality ingredients, with a health profile you feel great about eating, and still sell it for $1.99,” Woolf says. “The math does not math.”

I tasted my way through the shelf-stable, meal-worthy beans from Fillo’s, Heyday, and four other bean-aisle disruptors widely available in supermarkets around the country. Natural ingredients. Protein and fiber galore. Pretty healthy overall–if you’re not concerned about sodium. That was sometimes on the high side, though certainly no higher (and often lower) than what you’d find in, say, frozen entrees from the likes of Healthy Choice and Amy’s. One way around that? Stretch the servings you get from a can with other ingredients, a strategy both healthy and thrifty. Though the new-school cans and pouches below are designed as meals in themselves, I offer suggestions for zhuzhing them, all very easy to pull off whether you’re cooking at a campsite or staring down your pantry on a weeknight.