Here's Who We Can Thank For Inventing Canned Beanee Weenee

Laugh at the name all you want, but Van Camp's Beanee Weenee has probably saved your life a time or two. Maybe you were up all night in college, cramming for a calculus final and needed shelf-stable brain food. Maybe you were camping with your sixth grade Brownie troop and couldn't make a fire one rainy night, thereby falling back on a cold but protein-packed dinner of baked beans and hot dogs. Whatever your experience with this infamous product, the canned food has a surprisingly rich history of feeding people in a pinch.

While it's true the Beanee Weenee founders didn't specifically invent the combination of baked beans and frankfurters (that's up for debate), they did invent the concept of packing them together in a can for convenience. It's worth noting that the Van Camps were a real family that opened a small grocery in Indianapolis in 1861 to sell their home-canned foods. Pork and beans was already a basic dish for working class families in the 19th century, and the onset of the Civil War only intensified the need for ready-to-eat meals that could travel long distances.

Enter Gilbert Van Camp. Thanks to his tinned food experience, he secured a life-changing federal contract to feed the Union Army, thus ensuring generations of Americans would be eating canned beanies and weanies in the years to come. By the 1880s, the Van Camps were producing 8 million cans of pork and beans from their factory in Indiana priced at an affordable six cents per can. The family company flourished for 70 years before selling to the fellow food packaging business Stokely Brothers and Company, but the Van Camp name and products remained.

By the middle of the 20th century, consumers were looking for processed and convenient foods, especially with the rise of modern supermarkets and dual-income households. With parents having less time to cook, reaching for a can of comfort food that required minimal storage and prep was a game-changer. Although the Van Camp's had made a version of franks and beans for decades, the name "Beanee Weenee" appeared on cans sometime in the 1960s. Further cementing the iconic dish in the minds of children growing up in the 1980s and '90s was its advertising: The silly name was turned into a catchy commercial jingle that you might still hum today. Though the ready-to-eat meal craze has evolved since then, you can still celebrate the retro classic once a year as the official National Bean' N' Frank Day is every July 13.