This Canned Green Bean Variety Is Far Too Pungent For Our Liking

The grocery store is a competitive place by nature. Long aisles and tall shelves are filled with brands jockeying for your attention, trying to get you to choose their product from among a sea of similar offerings. This may be most apparent in the canned food aisle, where choices are often made on the label alone. As such, it behooves a brand to, say, try to elevate its canned green beans with a few extra ingredients. When done right, it's an excellent business strategy. Unfortunately, as discovered in our ranking of canned green bean brands, when done wrong, it can be pretty nasty.

The can that came out at the very bottom of our ranking is one such product: Del Monte's Teriyaki Whole Green Beans. The premise is simple: a can of uncut green beans that come swimming in a mild teriyaki sauce, so that they are pre-seasoned and ready to go straight to the dinner table or to be used as an additional layer of Asian flavor. Unfortunately, the taste just doesn't land. The label promises a "sweet & savory" flavor, but the beans themselves are quite bland — aside from an overwhelming dose of ginger, that is.

The ingredients list is vague, including just green beans, water, sugar, salt, yeast extract, and other "natural flavors," so it is not exactly clear where the problem comes from. Notably, however, one of the key ingredients of a traditional teriyaki sauce recipe — soy sauce — is pointedly excluded, as noted on the front of the can. The texture is decent, but the combination of bland beans and pungent ginger makes this can a no-go for us.

A quick scan across the various platforms for grocery reviews that exist on the internet shows that while our distaste for these beans is not a universal opinion, they have certainly received mixed reviews. On Del Monte's own website, the product boasts a 3.8 star rating out of a possible five, but the breakdown of the average rating shows a 3.0 for value and a 1.0 for quality. Echoing our experience, one reviewer writes, "I expected teriyaki taste, but was overwhelmed by the taste and smell of something that reminded me of soap or cologne." This same sentiment pops up repeatedly throughout the lower reviews: a taste that was both pungent and wrong.

To score a 3.8, however, you know that there must be some good reviews out there as well. Among those giving these beans five-stars are notes like, "The texture is pleasantly firm, and the sauce coats the beans without feeling heavy." But even reviews that give these beans full marks mention strange and somewhat unpleasant aspects of the flavor. Some mention a lingering artificial aftertaste, while others call it soapy.

There are, of course, plenty of others who assert that these green beans smell and taste great, so if you happen to already have a can in your pantry, it might not be so bad. That said, it's probably a good idea to come up with a plan for working that can into one of our many other green bean recipes, rather than eating them straight as a side dish. That way, any potential pungency will be diluted amidst a larger mélange of flavors.