We do not advertise. We leave cans.

Sanjay cooks navy beans in a rented commissary kitchen outside Boston, in a forty-gallon kettle that takes most of a morning to come up to temperature and most of an evening to come back down. The first batch was one hundred and eighty cans. He kept six and gave away the rest.

The beans were good. This is the part of the story that nobody disputes. People who had been given a can asked where they could buy another one, and there was nowhere, because there was no company yet — only a man with a kettle and a label he had drawn himself, cream stock, brick-red serif, a small green sprig, and the line he has never since changed: Good Beans. Brighter Days.

A marketing department was considered at that point and rejected. Not as an economy — it was simply felt that a good can of beans ought to be able to find its own audience if placed somewhere worth standing. So instead of buying attention, the company began placing cans.

A can is carried, by hand, into somewhere with a long view. It is set down on a rock, a rail, a boardwalk post, a branch. Nobody photographs it. Nobody is told. Then the company waits, which is the only part of the strategy that requires discipline. Eventually a stranger finds the can, photographs it, and posts the photograph. That is the entire funnel.

Navy beans, and time

We use small white navy beans, dried, from a farm in the Connecticut River valley. They are soaked overnight in cold water and cooked the next day — never from a jar, never pre-cooked, never rushed with baking soda. Soaking is the only shortcut in the process and it is not really a shortcut, it is a courtesy to the bean.

The sauce is dark brown sugar, molasses, cider vinegar, yellow mustard, tomato, grated onion and salt. That is it. The sweetness is restrained enough that you can still taste the bean underneath it, and the vinegar is there to keep the whole thing from going sticky and flat on the back of the tongue.

Then the kettle goes to a low temperature and stays there for six hours with the lid on. The smoke comes from the pot and from cured pork, not from a bottle; the cedar in Cedar Swamp Reserve is real cedar, and the apple wood in Smoked Maple is real apple wood. Slow cooking is the whole technique. There is no other technique.

What comes out is a bean that holds its shape in the spoon and then gives way completely, in a liquid thick enough to coat the back of the spoon rather than run off it. The colour is deep mahogany. A fifteen-ounce can feeds two people who are being honest about it.

Eat them hot on buttered toast, beside two fried eggs, or cold from the can with a spoon at a trailhead, which is how most of our customers appear to have discovered us.