Veg Power has just landed almost £1.4m from the National Lottery Community Fund to fire up a three-year, UK-wide push on beans, pulses and legumes. It’s a smart collaboration with The Food Foundation, Ark Agency and local authorities, with schools in the spotlight from November 2025. That’s a serious win for vegetables – again. And that’s really my question: why veg-only, again? Why not bring fruit under the same umbrella when we need every lever we can pull to shift diets away from energy drinks and ultra-processed foods?

I understand the logic. Kids consistently eat less veg than fruit, so if you’re chasing the biggest public-health gain, nudging vegetables makes sense. Beans and pulses also tick the climate box as low-emission proteins, so you get nutrition plus sustainability in one hit. Keeping the brief strictly veg keeps the messaging clean and the measurement tidy, especially in schools and retail where behaviour change is easier to track. I get it.

But step into the real world with me for a second. I was recently at a major UK soft-fruit packhouse – producing over 80 million punnets a year – and they’re seeing a 25% year-on-year surge in blueberries. That’s not an isolated blip; the berries category is a £2 billion magnet for families, and blueberries are flying, especially with kids and young parents. If fruit is already winning the hearts, baskets and lunchboxes of the nation, why not hitch the bean wagon to that momentum? Pair the two. Let fruit’s pulling power open the door, and let beans walk right through it.

We’ve been here before. Veg Power’s roots include the Peas Please coalition, which mobilised industry and delivered an extra 1.1 billion portions of veg sold or served. That’s real programme-level success. But when the cost-of-living crisis hit, national veg purchasing slid to a 50-year low. The lesson? Great campaigns still struggle to move population-level behaviour without tailwinds on price, procurement, promotion and culture. So the new beans push has to be bigger than comms. It needs the retail mechanics, school-meal defaults, foodservice habits and value cues that make beans the easy, tasty, low-cost choice every day.

Here’s a pragmatic twist that keeps Veg Power’s veg-first mission intact while using fruit’s momentum to accelerate adoption. Start where families are already saying “yes”: snack time, lunchboxes, quick weeknight plates. Position simple beans + berries moments – bright, quick, five-minute ideas that schools can trial and retailers can spotlight in meal-planning content. Put the pairing together online and in-store so discovery feels effortless. Back it with chef-led, five-ingredient recipes that actually work on a busy Tuesday. And bring the berry marketing brains into the room to pressure-test shopper journeys, content and in-store theatre. If they’re driving 25% blueberry growth, there’s clearly something to learn.

Think about how families actually eat. Fruit already wins the lunchbox, the snack, the quick add-on. Beans win on protein, fibre, affordability and climate. Put them together and you get tasty, colourful, five-minute ideas that stick: black beans with mango and lime in wraps; blueberries blended into a creamy white-bean smoothie for protein without the price tag; chickpeas tossed with grapes, cucumber and mint for a sweet-savoury salad that survives a school day; cannellini beans folded into a peach and basil salad for BBQ season; even roasted chickpeas with dried cranberries as a grab-and-go snack. Simple, family-proof combos that tick health, taste and cost.

Now imagine the mechanics around that. Retailers cross-merchandising punnets with pantry beans in meal-planning carousels and end-caps. School caterers swapping one ultra-processed snack a week for a beans-plus-fruit option kids actually pick up. Field demos that show growers and retailers how to tell the story – fibre + polyphenols + plant protein – in formats people will repeat on a Tuesday night. Measure household penetration and repeat, not just “portions served”, so we know we’re changing baskets, not only headlines.

Bottom line: the beans campaign is good news – serious funding, credible partners, a clear climate-health mission. But if Peas Please taught us anything, it’s that moving national diets is hard, especially when wallets are tight. A smart “veg-plus” coalition that rides fruit’s current wave could make beans land faster with kids and young families – and deliver the impact we all say we want.

Over to you. If you’re a retailer, brand, grower or local authority who wants to pilot Beans + Berries activations with Beanstalk Global, DM me. Let’s test, learn and scale – together. And make the difference.