Why naked beans & peas?

Our new organic naked fava beans and yellow peas can be used just like split beans and peas - there are just a few intact whole pulses that will generally split in half when soaked and cooked.

But why are some of our beans & peas now naked?

Processing after harvest is a key part of producing food from arable crops, though largely invisible. All pulses (and other grains and seeds) have to be cleaned after harvest for use as food, using an array of sieves, gravity tables (vibrating surfaces that separate out heavy stones and light chaff), colour-sorters (laser scanning to remove anything that's not the right colour), metal detection and more. To produce split beans and peas, the skin is then removed and the pulses mechanically split into two halves.

There are very few processors in the UK with the facility to produce the best quality pulses. In May our main processor of split pulses - who we'd worked with since 2012 and were the only one with organic certification - closed their plant with no notice. This left us with no way of producing organic split beans and peas from British crops without sending the pulses overseas for processing.

This sudden loss of critical processing capacity and its impact is symptomatic of a food system in which key processing infrastructure has become increasingly concentrated, valuing the economic efficiency of a few large operators over the resilience and competition of smaller more local capacity. 

Happily we've found a solution and are now working with an alternative pulse processor, Askew & Barrett. While not previously working with organic crops, they've now achieved organic certification (in record time!) to process organic pulses for us. 

Askew & Barrett do an excellent job cleaning pulses but while they can remove the skins they don't have the equipment to split. Most of the beans and peas will split naturally in half during processing but some remain intact - so we call them naked rather than split.

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