Bean Supreme Barbecue Marinated Jackfruit

Bean Supreme is a New Zealand brand. They make vegetarian and vegan food substitutes and have been around for years. It’s super easy to find their products in the supermarket which is great and I often buy their burger patties or sausages. However if you are vegan you just need to be careful and check ingredients, while all their products are vegetarian a lot of them aren’t vegan and contain dairy. 

They recently brought out a new product – marinated jackfruit. They have 2 flavours in the range – barbecue and chilli and lime. Sounds good right? I tried the barbecue flavour.

On having a look at the packaging, it’s very clearly Bean Supreme. The recognisable black and white and the sort of linky text. It has lots of info including that it’s palm oil free and plant based. Although worth remembering is plant based doesn’t mean vegan, so check the ingredients. This product is vegan luckily. It also has a health star rating which is 4 stars and a little window so you can actually see the jackfruit product which I quite like. A lot of people have never had jackfruit so may be interested to see what they’re in for before buying or eating it. The text on the front of the packaging is well to be honest kind of an ugly brownish orange. I think they’re trying to go for a “barbecue colour” but it’s actually not very appealing. 

The outer packaging is a glossy cardboard and then you can pull out a plastic (or at least partially plastic) tray which has the marinated jackfruit inside. 

In my opinion the packaging is just kind of average. I mean it’s not terrible, at least everything compliments well. It’s just kind of boring and a bit cluttered, plus that ugly text colour.

Turning the package over to read the ingredients, I first notice that it’s not a huge ingredient list and I know what all the ingredients are. However I do also notice there are multiple instances of added sugar – first in the ketchup, then there’s coconut sugar (at least it’s natural though) then further down is molasses and finally just sugar. There’s no artificial colours or flavours or preservatives which is great. But then I scan down to the nutritional information and things are starting to not look so great. It says there are 2 servings per pack. One serving is 20.6 grams of carbs, yes 20! That is incredibly high. 16.8 grams of that is sugar. It’s not likely you’d just be eating half of this packet by itself as a meal so once you’ve added whatever you’re having with it that is going to be a LOT of carbs. Not good. It’s also not very high in protein with only 2.5grams per serve. Fibre isn’t bad though at 7.3 grams per serve.

Time to cook it and taste it.

The back of the packaging has 2 cooking methods. The first is it to microwave it! Just stab some holes in with a fork then it goes in for 1 minute, stir, then another 30 seconds (I’m paraphrasing) So easy!! The other method is to put it all into a frying pan with a little bit of oil and fry for a few minutes until hot. Also super easy. I’m going to fry it.

It’s reeaaally hard to open. There’s a plastic cover on the tray which even has a little tab to pull it off but it does not want to move. It takes me probably almost a minute just to open it. Points down for packaging. Anyway, I dump it into the frying pan and it starts sizzling away. I really do love the convenience of this product. The jackfruit is already shredded for me and marinaded, I literally just need to heat it. 

It smells so good and you can definitely smell that it’s barbecue flavour. It looks good too and is a really nice rich reddish brown. I’m excited to see what it tastes like.

After about 3 minutes in the frying pan it’s hot and ready to eat. Again, love the convenience. 

Ok so on tasting it it’s actually a little disappointing. The smell was so strong and delicious smelling when it was cooking I was kind of expecting a really strong barbecue flavour, but it’s lacking and a little bit bland. It’s also slightly sweet which is odd for a savoury dish, probably from all that added sugar. It’s not bad, it’s fine it’s just not great. The texture is kind of what you would expect, quite soft with some firmer pieces and it does look quite a lot like pulled pork. But I have a real problem with the lack of flavour.

Ths retails for $8 for one pack which is $4 per serve. A little pricey but then most meat substitutes are. 

Would I buy it again? I honestly don’t know. I think it’s good if you want an incredibly easy vegan meal. Although actually, would you class it as a whole meal? Probably not. I might buy it again if I want something super easy to cook up without any effort. And I am interested to try the chilli and lime flavour. However I don’t think it’s something I’m going to be buying on the regular.