Beans, Beans, They’re Good For Your Heart
The Algorithm™ has been hammering me with butter bean content; recipes and videos and podcasts. I'm not a huge bean guy, but they look pretty good. I just bought some at Harris Teeter. But, until the last couple months, I don't think I've ever even heard of a butter bean before. This may be a regional dialect thing, but new beans aren't just popping up out of nowhere, so I gave them a quick google. Turns out, butter beans are just lima beans. The exact same thing. Same species, same bean, different name. If you grew up in the '90s or '00s, I feel like lima beans had a reputation. I remember them as the food to hate -- the butt of the joke in the legume world. I remember reading A Bad Case of Stripes, where Camilla Cream wouldn't eat her lima beans out of fear of being ousted as a lima lover. And now I'm discovering that the hot, sexy, trendy butter bean is the same thing as the disgusting lima. Nobody changed the bean. Nobody genetically modified it or grew a new variety. It's all Phaseolus lunatus (though, admittedly harvested at different points in their growth cycle). So, my theory is that Big Bean has rebranded limas to a more palatable and less entrenched name. I pulled up Google Trends to confirm my theory, and searches for "lima bean" have been steadily declining since 2004. Meanwhile, "butter bean" is at an all-time high. I'm convinced that this is a rebrand in action.
Same Bean, New Bean
"Lima bean" is out. It has too much baggage. It reminds people of school cafeterias, of being forced to eat vegetables they didn't want, Camilla Cream, and of that chalky texture when they're overcooked. "Butter bean," on the other hand, sounds delicious. It evokes richness, comfort, Southern grandma cooking. It promises creaminess right there in the name. It feels artisanal, trendy, like something you'd find at a farmers market. There's no childhood trauma attached to it. And suddenly, a generation of people who swore off lima beans are now watching TikToks of high-protein butter bean everything.
I've absolutely done this with features. Rename something, move it around, change carousel order, and suddenly behavior changes. Sometimes the rebrand is the feature.