Canned items have racked up millions of views on TikTok - but are they delicious and healthy? Sophie Morris experiments
Does a tin of olives and a canned cocktail count as dinner? It’s day five of my weeklong experiment in eating tinned food and I can’t be bothered to make a hot meal. Although there are countless canned alcoholic drinks to choose from, I find most too sweet, so the discovery of the Whitebox “Freezer Martini” is a game changer.
On the food side, our desire for tinned goods has hit a sweet spot between value and luxury, and thrown off its sensible but somewhat fuddy-duddy reputation with Gen Z by making waves on TikTok, where air-fryer tinned potatoes have a cult following and the Hawaiian snack Spam musubi has generated hundreds of millions of views.
Even Heinz has been shaking up its tinned food offering in recent months, with the launch of its canned carbonara, the first new pasta product in a decade.
Our appetite for canned food knows no bounds, whether in solid or liquid form; 2024’s range of canned drinks makes previous decades seem so quaint; in the Noughties M&S gins in tins were the only horse in the tinned-booze race.
The market for wine in cans has surged, too, from a value of £2.5m in the UK in 2018, to £10.7m in 2020, with predictions it will grow by 11.6 per cent every year for the next decade. There’s even a Michelin-starred restaurant in Yorkshire, The Black Swan at Oldstead, serving canned wine tableside.
Neither fine wine nor Spam made my menu, but preppers should be delighted to hear that after a week of basing all meals around cans, I wasn’t bored. I could have spent another week wading through nostalgic eats such as spaghetti hoops and ramping up my bean and pulses intake. My main complaint is that I was hungry. Sure, I could fashion generous banquets from tinned goods, but I missed filling leafy greens and the crunch of fresh fruit.
Day one started well. I was excited about breakfast, as tinned fruit has a strong nostalgic quality to it for me. Plus it saves on the faff of peeling or clearing up. Is it less healthy? There’s a little citric acid in my tinned pears and I suppose I’ve lost the fibre in the skin, but paired with thick yoghurt and granola, it definitely gives off “pudding for breakfast” vibes.
Lunch, Aldi’s Specially Selected butternut squash and prosciutto soup, was less successful: bland with a watery consistency. I didn’t finish it but ate four slices of toast and butter. I tried to source canned bread but it’s very expensive, from £9.95 for a 500g tin of pumpernickel on Amazon to £8 (plus £18 p&p!) for an American delicacy called B&M canned brown bread.
Waitrose says tinned product sales are booming compared with this time last year. “Covid reignited a resurgence in buying store cupboard staples,” says the supermarket’s trend innovation manager, Lizzie Haywood.
“Our food-loving customers are looking for high-quality tinned products.” Sainsbury’s says that its most popular canned goods are tomatoes, sweetcorn and pineapple, but less usual products like whole hearts of palm are also selling well. Meanwhile, both Sainsbury’s and Asda shoppers are saving by moving away from brands to own-label lines.
Can we rely on tins for a healthy diet? “I’m a big fan of canned or tinned beans and lentils, and regularly eat them,” says microbiome scientist Dr Emily Leeming, author of Genius Gut: The Life- Changing Science of Eating for Your Second Brain.
“What matters most for your health is what you eat most days. If you occasionally have spaghetti hoops that doesn’t matter.”
What about all the additives and preservatives? “Canned foods often contain added salt to enhance the flavour, though a significant amount is drained away, especially if you rinse the canned food,” says Leeming. “If you have high blood pressure, be careful of the salt content in canned ready meals, as 70 per cent of our salt intake in the UK comes from ultra-processed foods.”
“I use canned foods in my own kitchen but the less processed versions,” says dietitian Priya Tew.
“They can be a super quick and nutritious way to make a meal.”
I’ve been looking forward to the Heinz tinned pastas as I haven’t eaten any since the 90s, especially the new carbonara that sold out in days on its August launch. I had to beg a can from Heinz itself. We tested out the Heinz carbonara and hoops together, and I felt compelled to add a side of carrots and peas (also from a tin). I had high hopes for the hoops, as I want to turn them into a kind of baked pasta cake, a timballo, topped with aubergine, for a weekend centrepiece.
The Heinz carbonara was incredibly sloppy, more of a spaghetti soup. But I wasn’t offended by it; it is what it says on the can - a blend of more than 20 ingredients. My husband and I cleared our plates, though even with two cans of pasta, the veg and most of a loaf, we weren’t full. My daughter refused. Could I tempt her with the idea of a spaghetti hoop cake, surely any child’s dream dish? No.
“Stop involving me in your endless research,” she shrieked. “I hate canned pasta and will never eat it again.”
“Most European countries have a culture of putting the very best, seasonal produce in a tin,” says Monika Linton (inset), founder of Spanish food business Brindisa.
“Here, we have more of a post-war attitude to tinned food; something to be ashamed or embarrassed of.”
Brindisa was the first to bring cans of Perelló olives to these shores, which are somehow both now cult and ubiquitous, and to open our eyes to the possibilities of tinned fish when it began importing Ortiz anchovies and tuna in 1990.
Ortiz is now stocked in most supermarkets and is a bestseller at The Fish Society, along with Icelandic cod liver. “We’ve always done tinned fish,” the chief executive, Jeremy Grieve, tells me.
“But it used to fill half a shelf. Now we have an entire ambient room.”
The popularity of tinned fish has paved the way for retailers like The Tinned Fish Market, which sells goose barnacles and Cornish mussels in nduja, and a tiny new cannery in Dorset, Sea Sisters.
On the second day, I’d planned to transform a can of chilli into a Tex Mex spread. But deterred by the failures of the previous evening, I made rice bowls with tinned veg and Fish Society mackerel in olive oil instead. Percy begrudgingly tried the fish and loved it. Later in the week we had a huge win with tinned salmon fishcakes, a quarter of the cost of fresh fish. Some effort required, but exceedingly pleasing on the wallet and all the plates were licked clean.
For more budget ideas, I turned to Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store Cupboard Recipes by Jack Monroe, and made a simple cake from a can of fruit cocktail, flour, butter, sugar and eggs. It’s delicious.
With tinned food, it’s often not the price of the tins themselves - they’re not always cheaper - but how useful they are if you don’t have good storage or cooking facilities. Cans can be literal lifesavers if you don’t have access to a fridge or oven.
Day three was cold and damp. I cheered us up with macaroni and cannellini cheese with a roasted cauliflower crust from a new cookbook, Everyday Comfort by Katie Pix, an excuse to try out the Potts canned stocks - a pleasing discovery - and a great success, providing leftover lunches for two days.
I finished the week with a classic North American dish of Campbell’s tuna noodle casserole, basically a tuna pasta bake made with a tin of Campbell’s soup.
In a piece about tinned food, I couldn’t leave you without a mention of baked beans. There are so many kinds. They are best served in a jacket potato and suffocated in grated Cheddar.
There’s often an uproar when household brands adapt recipes, but our taste buds evolve with time, anyway, and the renaissance of tinned food, which runs the gamut from retro items like Spam and sardines to newcomers like fine wine, is proof of this.