Household Ingredients Compared  ›  Canned Beans & Legumes (Singapore)

Canned beans & legumes: what's actually in it?

Two very different products share the canned-beans shelf. Plain beans are cooked beans in water, sometimes with salt — two or three ingredients. Beans in sauce (mostly baked beans in tomato sauce) are beans plus a sweetened, thickened sauce — sugar, tomato paste, modified starch, vinegar and spices. The front of the can rarely makes the gap clear; the ingredient list does. A third group, beans in a flavoured sauce (curry, chilli, cheese), adds a sauce of its own and is panelled separately below.

This page covers canned and jarred beans and legumes sold in Singapore: baked beans, kidney beans, chickpeas (garbanzo beans), black beans, butter beans, cannellini/white beans, lentils, mixed beans and flavoured-sauce beans. Dried beans are a different product and are out of scope for this page — they are sold dry, need soaking/cooking, and carry no comparable pack list. Sweetened azuki/red-bean paste cans (a dessert ingredient) are noted only as adjacent, not panelled as beans. This page does not give a health score or a "best" pick.

The headline, in 30 seconds

• Plain beans can be two ingredients. Biona Organic Red Kidney Beans (400g can) lists "Red Kidney Beans*, Water" — no salt at all. Biona Black Beans (400g can) is the same pattern: "Black Beans*, Water".
• Most plain beans are three ingredients: beans, water, salt. Cirio chick peas and cannellini are "Rehydrated [beans], water, salt" on the brand's own site — though some retailers list the same Cirio cans with ascorbic acid added, so check the SG can.
• Baked beans are a sauce product, not plain beans. Heinz Beanz Original is 51% beans and 34% tomatoes, then water, sugar, modified cornflour, vinegar, salt and condiments. Ayam Brand's Singapore list starts with water, then beans, sugar and tomato paste — sugar is the third ingredient.
• "Light" does not mean the same thing twice. Ayam Light is 50% less sugar than Ayam regular, but its per-100g energy as printed on the Singapore brand site (93 kcal) is higher than the regular can's (79 kcal) — the sauce is thicker, not just less sweet. Read the panel, not the front.
• Sugar hides in plain-looking cans too. S&W's US kidney-bean list includes sugar (after water, before salt), plus calcium chloride and calcium disodium EDTA. That is a US retailer list, not a verified SG pack — but it is a warning not to assume a plain kidney-bean can is sugar-free.
• Same brand, two different baked-bean recipes. Biona's 400g can is haricot beans (49%) with tomato puree (21%) and sugar; its 350g jar is water first, white beans (38%), tomato passata (12%) and agave syrup (5%). They are different products — do not copy one list onto the other.
• Nutrition figures disagree across markets for the same product. Heinz baked beans and Biona kidney beans both have materially different per-100g figures in UK, Australian and brand sources, so their nutrition is not tabled here — see the nutrition section for why, and for the figures that could be tabled with confidence (Ayam Singapore, Biona chick peas, Biona baked beans 400g).

At a glance

Panelled with verbatim lists: 19 products. Of these, 6 rows are from Singapore sources (FairPrice ingredient sections or the Ayam Brand Singapore site: Heinz Original, Heinz NZ tomato sauce, Ayam classic, Ayam Light, Ayam Vegetarian, Ayam Hi-Fibre), 2 from Shopee Singapore seller descriptions (Ayam Parmesan; Ayam classic corroboration), and the rest from brand sites or secondary sources flagged as non-SG on each card — Cirio and Biona from their brand sites, S&W from US retailer/Open Food Facts listings, Heinz No Added Sugar from Open Food Facts. No SG pack photo was available for any product in this pass, so every non-SG-sourced row still needs an SG pack check. Seen-but-not-verified: see the list below — it is long, because FairPrice's beans category is far wider than the lists retrievable online.

Prices are deliberately not shown here: they change weekly and would go stale. This site compares ingredients only.

Baked beans in tomato sauce

Beans in other sauces — mixed beans & curry

Plain beans in water / brine — no sauce

FairPrice beans category — the wider shelf (inventory, 5–6 Nov 2026)

FairPrice's online beans category is far wider than the 19 rows panelled above. The following were inventoried from FairPrice category and similar-product listings on 5–6 November 2026. None of them is panelled, because no verbatim ingredient list was retrieved for any of them in this pass — FairPrice publishes an ingredient section only for some products, and the rest show a name and size only. They are listed here so the gap is visible, not hidden.

• Baked beans (house and value brands): FairPrice Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce 420g; LITALY Baked Beans 400g; Lena Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce; Mili Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce.
• Plain beans (value / Italian imports): LITALY Chick Peas 400g, LITALY Red Kidney Beans 400g, LITALY Black Beans 400g; Lena Chick Peas 2.55kg, Lena Red Kidney Beans, Lena White Beans 400g; Strianese Chick Peas 400g, Strianese Cannellini White Kidney Beans; Hosen Select Chick Peas in Brine; Pastagetti's Premium Chick Peas in Brine, Butter Bean in Brine, Red Kidney Peas in Brine; Global Organics Chick Peas — No Added Salt; Clearspring Bio Kitchen Organic Demeter Chickpeas 350g; La Fragua Extra Chickpeas, La Fragua Extra Black Beans; La Costena Whole Black Beans, La Costena Whole Pinto Beans in Can.
• Biona organic range (beyond the panelled rows): Borlotti Beans, Butter Beans, Pinto Beans, Haricot Beans, Aduki Beans, Blackeye Beans, Black Chick Peas, Edamame Beans, Chilli Black Bean, Chilli Beans, Spicy Baked Beans 350g, Chickpea Curry Indian Style 350g, Chickpea Tagine Moroccan Style 350g.
• Cirio: Lenticchie (Lentils) 410g.
• Ayam Brand (beyond the panelled rows): Chickpeas — Tomato Sauce 425g; Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce — Low GI; Baked Beans — English Recipe (Tomato Sauce) 230g/425g (nutrition retrieved from FairPrice, ingredients not retrieved — see nutrition section); Processed Peas (a peas product, not beans — noted here only because it sits in the same Ayam range).
• Adjacent, not beans: Hotei Azuki Canned Red Beans — a sweetened red-bean (azuki) product, likely a dessert ingredient; it is not a savoury bean and is not panelled as one. Needs a pack check to classify properly.

Channels not inventoried in this pass: Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart, Lazada and the specialty/import grocers were not inventoried for canned beans in this pass. Web search hit its rate limit (429) part-way through this build on 5 November 2026, and the page-fetch tool then failed on the FairPrice product pages it was asked to open — so the inventory above is FairPrice + Shopee Singapore + brand sites only. Cold Storage in particular publishes no ingredient list on any product page (established on the orange-juice page), so its bean shelf would need pack photos in any case. This is the single biggest gap on this page: the FairPrice shelf is inventoried, the other chains are not. Do not treat this page as a whole-of-Singapore shelf until those channels are checked and the FairPrice seen-but-not-verified list above is worked through with pack photos.

Seen but not verified — do not panel until checked

• FairPrice house and value brands: FairPrice Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce 420g; LITALY Baked Beans, Chick Peas, Red Kidney Beans, Black Beans; Lena Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, Chick Peas, Red Kidney Beans, White Beans; Mili Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce — all inventoried at FairPrice, no ingredient list retrieved for any of them.
• Plain beans, Italian/import brands: Strianese Chick Peas and Cannellini White Kidney Beans; Hosen Select Chick Peas in Brine; Pastagetti's Premium Chick Peas, Butter Bean and Red Kidney Peas in Brine; Global Organics Chick Peas — No Added Salt; Clearspring Bio Kitchen Organic Demeter Chickpeas; La Fragua Extra Chickpeas and Extra Black Beans; La Costena Whole Black Beans and Whole Pinto Beans — inventoried at FairPrice, no lists retrieved.
• Biona organic range: Borlotti, Butter, Pinto, Haricot, Aduki, Blackeye, Black Chick Peas, Edamame, Chilli Black Bean, Chilli Beans, Spicy Baked Beans, Chickpea Curry Indian Style, Chickpea Tagine — inventoried at FairPrice, no SG lists retrieved. (Biona's UK site lists most of these with beans/water/sea-salt patterns, but those UK lists were not retrieved per product in this pass and must not be assumed to match the SG cans.)
• Cirio Lenticchie (Lentils) 410g — inventoried at FairPrice; no list retrieved. Cirio's brand site lists other lentil products, but the SG 410g can was not matched to one.
• Ayam Brand: Chickpeas — Tomato Sauce 425g (listed on the Ayam Singapore site under "Others", no ingredient list retrieved); Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce — Low GI (FairPrice listing only); Baked Beans — English Recipe 230g/425g (FairPrice nutrition retrieved — 72 kcal, 4.6g protein, 0.3g fat, 12.6g carbohydrate, 4.6g sugars, 266mg sodium per 100g — but no ingredient list retrieved, so it is not panelled).
• Hotei Azuki Canned Red Beans — sweetened azuki; classify from the pack before paneling anywhere.
• All canned beans at Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart, Lazada and specialty/import grocers — not inventoried in this pass (see the channels note above). This includes any Waitrose/house-brand beans at Cold Storage and any parallel-imported beans at Donki/Meidi-Ya/Le Petit Depot/Mustafa.
• Dried beans, dried lentils, dried chickpeas — out of scope for this page, not "seen but not verified".

Nutrition — what the numbers say

All figures in the table are as sold, per 100 g. Sugars in plain beans are the beans' own sugars, not added sugar — the ingredient panels show which products add sugar and which do not. Drained vs total contents matters and is flagged where known: canned-bean nutrition is published on different bases in different markets — some panels are per 100g of total contents (beans + liquid), others per 100g drained — and the source rarely says which. Where two sources for the same product disagree in a way that looks like a basis difference, no figure is tabled for that product at all (see below). No official Singapore Nutri-Grade (A–D) was found printed on any of these bean listings in this pass, so none is quoted here; no grade has been assigned.

Salt and sodium: salt = sodium × 2.5. The table shows sodium as printed (in mg) with the salt equivalent in brackets. Where the source printed salt instead of sodium (Biona), sodium is derived as salt ÷ 2.5 and flagged as derived. Sodium is not presented as salt, and salt is not presented as sodium.

Total vs added sugars: Singapore packs list total sugars, not added sugars. A total-sugars figure is never labelled here as "added sugar". The ingredient list remains the evidence for added sugar (sugar, agave syrup) versus naturally occurring sugars in the beans themselves.

Open Food Facts is a community database and is flagged as secondary where used: the pack and the retailer/brand nutrition section take precedence if they disagree. Figures marked "not stated" were not in the source retrieved; they are not estimated, borrowed from another variant, or copied across flavours. Saturated fat is "not stated" for the Ayam rows because the Ayam Singapore nutrition tables retrieved did not include a saturated-fat line in the search results.

Observed numbers, no verdict: Among the Ayam baked beans, sugars per 100g are 6.2g (regular), 4.8g (Light), 4.9g (Vegetarian) and 6.3g (Hi-Fibre) — Light and Vegetarian are the lowest-sugar Ayam cans on this evidence, but Light has the highest energy per 100g of the four (93 kcal vs 79/87/81 kcal), so "less sugar" and "fewer calories" do not move together here. Sodium per 100g is 288mg for regular and Vegetarian, 297mg for Hi-Fibre, and 142mg for Light — Light is the clear sodium outlier of the four. Biona chick peas list 3.0g sugars and 5.7g protein per 100g, against Biona baked beans' 5.9g sugars and 4.6g protein — the plain bean is lower in sugars on these figures, but the two products are different foods (plain beans vs beans in sauce), so the table does not rank them.

Seen but not verified (nutrition): no per-100g nutrition panel is tabled for Heinz Beanz Original, Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce (NZ), Heinz No Added Sugar, Ayam Parmesan, Ayam Mixed Beans, Ayam Japanese Curry, Cirio chick peas, Cirio cannellini, Biona red kidney beans, Biona black beans, Biona mixed beans, S&W kidney beans or S&W garbanzo beans. Their ingredient panels are unchanged; their nutrition figures are not estimated here. Three of those omissions are deliberate, not oversights: (1) Heinz Original — UK (Dunnes: 81 kcal, fat 0.4g, carbohydrate 15.5g, sugars 4.3g, protein 4.8g, salt 0.6g), Open Food Facts (78 kcal, fat 0.2g, carbohydrate 12.5g, sugars 4.7g, protein 4.7g, sodium 240mg) and Australian (350 kJ, protein 4.8g, fat 0.5g, carbohydrate 12.8g, sugars 4.7g, sodium 355mg) figures disagree with each other, so no single per-100g row can be trusted for the SG can; (2) Biona red kidney beans — Tesco's 400g can gives 150 kcal and 27g carbohydrate per 100g, while Biona's own site gives 108 kcal and 15g carbohydrate for the same 400g can and 73 kcal / 8.8g carbohydrate for the 350g jar, a spread that looks like drained vs total-contents bases being mixed; (3) Biona black beans — same problem (72 kcal / 8g carbohydrate for the 400g can on the brand site vs 81 kcal / 12.6g carbohydrate for the 350g jar); and Cirio chick peas — one retailer gives 125 kcal, 16.8g carbohydrate, 0.8g salt per 100g and another gives 121 kcal, 11.2g carbohydrate, 0.2g salt, again consistent with different bases. Ayam English Recipe is not panelled for ingredients, but FairPrice does publish its nutrition per 100g: 72 kcal, 4.6g protein, 0.3g total fat, 12.6g carbohydrate, 4.6g sugars, 266mg sodium — quoted here for the record, not tabled as a panelled product. S&W nutrition in US listings is per 130g serving only (kidney beans: 110 kcal, 0g fat, 20g carbohydrate, 2g sugars, 7g protein, 370mg sodium per serving; garbanzo beans: 120 kcal per 130g serving per Open Food Facts), so it is quoted as printed and not converted to per 100g.

How to read a canned-beans label — the jargon, in plain English

Navy / haricot beans

Small white beans, the classic baked-bean bean. Heinz uses navy beans; Biona's canned baked beans use haricot beans — the same bean family, different naming by market.

Great Northern beans

Large white beans, Ayam Brand's baked-bean bean, imported from the USA. Bigger and more tender than navy beans — the size difference is the brand's main claim.

Garbanzo beans = chickpeas

The same legume under two names. US brands (S&W) say "garbanzo"; UK/European brands (Cirio, Biona) say "chick peas".

Cannellini

A large white kidney bean, pale and tender, from the Italian tradition. Not the same as a Great Northern bean, though both are white beans.

Borlotti / pinto / butter beans

Other canned beans on the same shelf: borlotti are speckled pink-brown beans; pinto are the speckled bean of Mexican cooking; butter beans are large, flat, creamy white beans (also sold as lima beans in the US).

Rehydrated beans

Beans dried, then soaked/cooked in water before canning. "Rehydrated chick-peas, water, salt" means the beans were dried first — it does not mean the can contains dried beans.

Modified starch / modified cornflour (INS 1422)

A thickener that gives baked-bean sauce its body. It is starch that has been treated so it holds up to canning heat. It is not sugar, and it is not a preservative.

Calcium chloride

A firming agent, used in S&W kidney beans, that keeps canned beans from going mushy. It is a salt of calcium, not table salt.

Calcium disodium EDTA / sodium metabisulfite

Colour protectors in US canned beans (S&W). EDTA binds trace metals that would discolour the beans; metabisulfite is a preservative/antioxidant. Neither appears in the Cirio or Biona plain-bean lists.

Oligofructose

A soluble fibre (a short-chain fructan) added to Ayam Hi-Fibre baked beans. It is a fibre ingredient, not a sweetener on this label, even though it is made from sugars.

Agave syrup / steviol glycosides

Sweeteners used instead of sugar: agave syrup in Biona's jarred baked beans, steviol glycosides (from stevia) in Heinz No Added Sugar. "No added sugar" does not mean "unsweetened".

Drained vs total contents

Canned-bean nutrition can be stated per 100g of everything in the can (beans + liquid) or per 100g of drained beans. Drained figures are higher in protein and carbohydrate because the water is gone. If the basis is not stated, two panels for the same product can look contradictory — that is what happened with Biona kidney beans and Cirio chick peas on this page.

Aquafaba

The viscous liquid in a can of chickpeas. Some cooks use it as an egg-white substitute. Rinsing canned beans (the usual advice) discards it — and with it, some of the canning sodium.

What this page is not

• Not a health score, and not a "best" pick. Plain beans and beans in sauce are different products, and this page does not rank them.
• Not a taste test, and not a price comparison. Prices change weekly; ingredients change less often, but still change.
• Not complete. The FairPrice seen-but-not-verified list above is long, and Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart, Lazada and the specialty grocers were not inventoried in this pass — for the verification reasons given, not hidden. Dried beans are out of scope, not missing.

Sources and method

Checked 5–6 November 2026 from: FairPrice Singapore category and product listings (beans category; Heinz Beanz Original and Heinz NZ baked beans ingredient sections; Ayam English Recipe nutrition); Ayam Brand Singapore official site (ayambrand.com.sg — classic, Light, Vegetarian, Hi-Fibre ingredient lists and per-100g nutrition); Shopee Singapore seller descriptions (Ayam Parmesan; Ayam classic corroboration); Ayam Brand Malaysia and Thailand brand sites (Mixed Beans, Japanese Curry, Parmesan percentages — flagged as non-SG); Cirio brand official site (cirio1856.com — chick peas, cannellini); Biona brand official site (biona.co.uk — chick peas, red kidney, black beans) and UK retailers Ocado, Tesco, McGrocer, Healthy Supplies, Whole Food Earth, Infinity Foods (Biona baked beans, mixed beans); US retailers QFC and City Market and Open Food Facts (S&W kidney and garbanzo beans; Heinz No Added Sugar). Full per-fact source list is in the accompanying research notes. Nutrition section added 5–6 November 2026: figures are standardised to per 100 g where the source gives per-100 figures; per-serving-only figures are labelled as such and are not converted; sugars are total sugars as printed, not added sugars, unless the source states added sugars; salt = sodium × 2.5, and where the source printed salt, sodium is derived as salt ÷ 2.5 and flagged. Where a full pack list could not be verified, the product is in seen-but-not-verified instead of being panelled. Research limits in this pass: web search returned 429 (rate limit) part-way through the build, and the page-fetch tool then failed on the FairPrice product pages it was asked to open, so several channels could not be inventoried and several FairPrice ingredient sections could not be re-checked by direct fetch; the lists used are the search-indexed FairPrice/brand-site/Shopee texts, quoted verbatim as retrieved.