“Why Am I So Stoked About Surprise Legumes??"
The Rancho Gordo Bean Club Obsession, Unpacked
Have you listened to this week’s episode of
on WTF is Going On With That Clothing Brand? If Madewell feels sad to you, if you’re stymied by Quince, if you’re barraged with Albion Fit ads — this episode’s for you.And thank you to the hundreds of you who sent funds to donate to Miry’s List — I’ll have the final total in Wednesday’s newsletter, and IT’S HUGE.
Finally, if you’re feeling exhausted by holiday magic-making labor….maybe it’s time to revisit The Mom Does It.
And now, it’s time for a very good guest interview. Every so often I get a pitch to hand the Culture Study reins over to someone else (usually a reader who *gets it*) to handle the interview (and get paid for it, of course — your subscriptions made it possible for me to pay significantly above the going industry rate).
This week, Kat Sklar interviews Rancho Gordo Bean Club founder Steve Sando. If you’re a bean person, you already know you’re gonna love it. If you’re not — this will give you a glimpse of how non-bean-people become rabid bean fanatics (hi, this is me now, the person cooking several pots of beans every week).
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This Culture Study guest interview edition is a deep dive on the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, which is, among a certain flavor of foodie, very famous. When an Internet acquaintance announced she’d gotten in earlier this year, I DM’d her a congratulations with a number of exclamation points I ordinarily reserve for family expansion announcements. I teared up when I got my own invite a week later. “This is bizarre!” I thought to myself, “Why am I so stoked about surprise legumes?? I must know more!”
If you’re not familiar, here’s the scoop: the Rancho Gordo Bean Club is a quarterly shipment of six one-pound bags of different legumes, a surprise item (most recently a seasoning mix), and a printed broadside describing the bean varieties with a recipe for each of them. The broadside, sub-headed “A Happy Place For Bean People”, is written by Rancho Gordo founder/CEO Steve Sando. It reads like a neighborhood association newspaper. (“For years we thought of Flageolet as the correct bean for a Cassoulet in France. We were wrong! But it is a popular bean.”)
You cannot pause your club membership; if you won’t be able to receive a particular shipment, you can change the address to ship it to a friend. Put another way: to keep beans from piling up in the pantry, Bean Club members need to make a pot of beans every other week. (Sando likes to point out that beans make a lovely hostess gift, should one’s supply become overwhelming.) One pound of beans cooked is about 6 cups. In my household using the basic bean preparation printed on each Rancho Gordo bag, that’s two shared dinners and three individual lunches per pound, or the protein for 24 dinner servings and 18 lunches sorted out for $49.95 per shipment.
As another way to quantify the madness, here’s a little timeline for you.
2017: Bean Club capped at 10,000 members, waitlist begins in earnest.
2020: 11k members, 11k waitlist.
2022: 11k members, 40k waitlist. Bean Club expansion to 20k announced.
2023: 20k members, 27k waitlist.
So what is it about these beans that has tens of thousands of people excited? I checked in with my local Rancho Gordo stockist, Wellspent Market, to get an outside perspective. Jim Dixon, Wellspent co-founder and longtime Portland food writer, explains it succinctly: “All commercial crops are grown more for the market than for the palate.” He also tells me that freshness is key: the younger the beans are, the less soaking and cooking time they need. Rancho Gordo only sells beans two years old or less; that’s young enough to skip a soak entirely. Dixon has been sourcing beans for himself, his recipes, and later his store for two decades. “I learned that if you buy better dried beans instead of just cheap dried beans, the beans will taste better.” Beyond freshness, is there anything particular that makes Rancho Gordo special? “He [Sando] sources good beans, because he knows good beans taste good.”
By the time my first Bean Club shipment arrives, I’m so far down the bean and Bean Club research rabbit hole that I’ve arranged an interview with Steve Sando. I realize I’d better cook some beans before I talk to him.My cooking skills are close to nonexistent — I’m a culinary passenger princess in a family of foodies — but I’ve recently taken a knife skills class that makes basic stuff less daunting. Turns out prep work is vastly more efficient when armed with pro tips and some supervised practice.
For my second batch, decide to try out those popular Flageolets. I follow the package directions, so: I dice an onion and a clove of garlic, pour enough olive oil into the pan to cover the bottom, and leave the heat on medium until the alliums give a little when prodded. Then I dump in my rinsed beans and enough freshly boiled water to thoroughly cover, but not so much I’m worried about the pan boiling over. That’s the same as “cover by about two inches” right? I break out a measuring tape against my wooden spoon to confirm.
Sando’s latest cookbook, The Bean Book, starts with a multipage elaboration on the package instructions. “Now increase the heat to medium-high and bring the liquid to a rapid boil. Once boiling, let it continue for ten to fifteen minutes. We joke that this is the time when we are letting the beans know we love them but we are in charge and to resist is futile. After the rapid boiling, we want the beans at such a gentle simmer that they’re barely bubbling, letting the beans cook undisturbed for hours.” I pace around for the 10 minute boil, lower the heat down to a simmer, and sit down to my Zoom interview.
Bean Club started in 2013. Sando recalls: “I overheard someone in Napa talking about starting a wine club, and I thought, ‘Who needs ANOTHER wine club, let’s have a BEAN club!’” When he started it, Sando was the lonely bean booth guy at the farmers market. He was hoping for dozens of club members. He got hundreds. The whole thing has been like that.
As of September 2024, Bean Club has expanded to 26,000 members. For each of the 24 varieties included in Bean Club annually, Rancho Gordo asks producers to grow 28,000 to 30,000 pounds of dried beans. For the smaller Mexican and Californian farms Sando works with, that’s the most of one crop they’ll grow. How small is a small producer in this context? The most recent USDA Agricultural Census in 2022 put California’s average production of BEANS, DRY EDIBLE, (EXCL CHICKPEAS & LIMA) per acre at about 2,000 lbs. (Side note: https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/is a good time, would recommend a visit next time you need a wholesome Internet field trip.)
That production figure includes industrial scale farms, and yields for heirloom beans are lower than average, so we’re talking about perhaps 20 acres to grow one variety.. Here are two ways to visualize the land involved in growing beans. My neighborhood has 5,000 square foot lots: an acre has 43,560 square feet, so for twenty acres, I’m imagining an area about 13x13 roomy urban lots. Scaling the other direction, an area roughly the size of queen bed yields about a pound of dried beans.
Moving up the chain of production: beans come to Rancho Gordo after they’ve been dried and processed, when they are ready for their final packaging. These days, the bean volume is high enough that they come in 2,000 pound Tyvec totes about the size of a standard pallet. They’re moved around by forklift. Sando winces when he tells me about earlier in the company’s history, when they got their shipments in 25 pound bags and had to open hundreds of those smaller bags to repackage the beans.
The dried beans get poured into an Italian machine nicknamed “The Beast”, which portions the beans into single pounds, forms a bag around each pound, and applies the front and back labels to the bag. When the Beast is done, workers inspect the bags by hand and replace crooked labels as needed. Sando confesses he’s sometimes “livid” when quality control doesn’t meet his standards. “You’ve seen it: people line their pantries with Rancho Gordo bags and post pictures. The bags need to look good! Some people are buying beans, but some people are buying The Experience Of Rancho Gordo Beans.”
After the bagging comes the boxing. How intense is the push for Bean Club compared to Rancho Gordo’s usual pace? According to Sando, “there’s a quarterly near-mutiny.” Ordinarily the Rancho Gordo warehouse, located in Napa, California alongside their retail store, ships out 200-300 boxes a day. It takes two to three weeks of dual shifts at the warehouse, supplemented by temporary workers, to get the 26,000 Bean Club boxes packed and out the door. At the height of the Covid bean rush (yes, that was absolutely a thing), they ran three shifts a day in the warehouse.
The box-in-the-mail clubs I’m most familiar with are yarn clubs, and here’s what I know to be absolutely true: the knitting internet gets very feisty about club spoilers. At this point, I’ve read how nice the private Bean Club Facebook group is from multiple press sources, and Sando has talked it up at a couple of different points. “Are you on there yet?!” Not yet. (AHP confirms: “It’s quite nice!”)
When I ask about how the group handles spoilers due to the relatively long shipping window for the club, Sando looks like he’s recalling a family feud that nearly led to estrangement. It’s the first time he goes quiet. “That was really, really hard.” RG staff now post when the first boxes are headed out, and those who want to avoid spoilers are advised to stay out of the group until their beans arrive. “You won’t miss anything, all the posts will still be here when you come back”.
I ask about the waitlist. I’d liken it to putting your email out there like a message in a bottle; eventually it washes back up with a secret club sign up password. It’s very low tech: there’s no way to check your estimated wait time or relative position. You also can’t remove yourself from the waitlist if you lose interest. “People think it’s a marketing gimmick. It’s not. I want Bean Club to stay special, and if I only send the beans I can get in larger amounts, that dilutes it.”
Sando, frankly, does not care about the waitlist. “The waitlist is not money in the bank.” He says Rancho Gordo occasionally sends a coupon for free shipping or other similar “we haven’t forgotten you” treat out to the waitlist folks. Beyond the excellence of the beans themselves, Sando attributes the unusually low churn in bean club membership to the sense of community from the Facebook group and the bean club newsletter. He also writes Bean-Club-exclusive emails and hosts Bean Club Town Hall webinar-style Zoom sessions.
Sando has written six books on beans and collected close to 200 recipes on the Rancho Gordo website. I’m a little overwhelmed by it all, and ask him to boil it down to essential cooking advice. “Beans: they’re not rocket science. Cook them slow. Keep the preparation simple. Don’t throw a ham hock in, you’ll miss out on the subtlety of the heirloom beans!” Then he abashedly admits that he actually mostly eats the leftover beans from the Rancho Gordo retail store, which makes a fresh pot for samples daily. “It’s been awhile since I actually made beans. Sometimes if I’m having a dinner party I request a particular variety for the store sample that day.”
In turn, I admit that the Buckeye beans I made last week when my bean club package appeared were actually the first beans I’d ever made myself from scratch. He looks at me like I’m an especially dim unicorn. “So you’re ONE of those people?” Yes. I signed up for the waitlist after years of my mother-in-law making really good beans from Rancho Gordo beans and encouraging me to try making beans too. Yes, I am usually about this slow to take good advice.
But how does he choose what beans become club beans? “Bean club people are my people. I put in what I want, and that seems to be working.” This sums up the entire sense of our conversation. Sando is twenty years into it, and he’s still amazed that when, at age 40, he finally started doing what he wanted without regard to other people’s opinions, that’s when he finally landed on something people were truly hungry for. The way he talks about how lucky he is reminds me of Taylor Swift at an award show, still excited about winning.
The person at the top of the Bean Club waiting list has been there a year, so if you want to get on the‘make beans from scratch’ train, you might as well start with what Rancho Gordo regularly stocks. Sando recommends: “start with smaller ones.” And similar to a kind they already know they like? “Yes.” For white beans, the Alubia Blanca. For red or pinto fans (this a ‘medium’ bean in Rancho Gordo parlance), the Buckeye. For a dark bean, the Santanero Negro or Midnight Black.
After Sando and I say goodbye, I get up to check on this week’s pot of beans. The kitchen smells great, and the beans are starting to soften; it’s time to salt them. Later, we eat them for dinner topped with a little bit of torn basil. They’re overdone, but still so delicious I can’t believe I made them myself. Maybe that’s the real secret to Bean Club’s success: even a distracted, inexperienced cook can make a good meal out of nice beans. ●
Kat Sklar is insatiably curious, and believes most endeavors are improved by a supporting spreadsheet. Professionally, they run The Friendly Spreadsheet, where they help people level up their money skills by asking good questions. Their current side quest is building a digital atlas of the many splendid places to get a little treat in their neighborhood in Portland, Oregon.
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