Grandma Brown's Baked Beans are a dead and gone. A hard pill to swallow, but it's true. If by some miracle you still have a can lying around, you might want to eat it soon... because the last "new" batch is set to expire next month.

I've been a bit of a "bean watcher" in the last year or so. I was fascinated by the fact that something as simple as a can of beans was going from "hard-to-find" to "collector's item." And that's exactly what cans of Grandma Brown's Baked Beans have become.

HISTORY OF GRANDMA BROWN'S

The history of Grandma Brown's Baked Beans dates back to the early 1930s when Grandma Lulu Brown started selling her hearty and flavorful homemade beans at a local farmer's market in Upstate New York. The secret family recipe quickly gained popularity, and Grandma Brown's became a household name.

Based in the small town of Mexico, the company flourished over the decades, building a devoted fan base not just in New York state, but beyond.

But then... something happened. Production shut down during COVID, but even as the rest of the U.S. returned to normalcy, the owner kept using the "COVID excuse" as to why production had not resumed. They seemed to be leaning heavily into "NoBoDy WaNts to WoRk!!!", but it appears that not too many people are buying that anymore.

GRANDMA BROWN'S BEANS ON EBAY

Unopened cans have been appearing on eBay for awhile. Presumably, people buy them "just to have" and not to eat. But if you do want to actually eat them, I have not seen a can with an expiration date beyond February 2024. I have "Grandma Brown's Baked Beans" as a saved search on eBay, and I check the listing each time one pops up, so I can say with some authority that this might be the last batch made.

Of course, whether or not you accept a product's expiration date as a hard and fast rule, that's up to you. There have been instances where canned goods were opened decades after their supposed expiration, and the contents were perfectly edible.

(There are entire YouTube channels devoted to this subject, and I'm sort of obsessed with them.)

Still, something to consider. The real Grandma Brown expired long ago, and her namesake beans are also close to doing so.