Does a tin of olives and a canned cocktail count as dinner? It’s day five of my week-long experiment in eating tinned food, and I can’t be bothered to make a hot meal. Although there are countless canned alcoholic drinks to choose from, I find most too sweet, so the discovery of the Whitebox ‘Freezer Martini’ is a game changer. On the food side, our desire for tinned goods has hit a sweet spot between value and luxury, and thrown off its sensible but somewhat fuddy-duddy reputation with Gen Z by making waves on TikTok, where air fryer tinned potatoes have a cult following and the Hawaiian snack spam musubi has generated hundreds of millions of views.
Even Heinz has been shaking up its tinned food offering in recent months, with the launch of its canned Carbonara , the first new pasta product in a decade. Quirky beans advice aside, our appetite for canned food currently knows no bounds, whether in solid or liquid form. 2024’s range of canned drinks makes previous decades seem so quaint; in the noughties M&S gins in tins were the only horse in the tinned-booze race.
The market for wine in cans has surged, too, from a value of £2.5m in the UK in 2018, to £10.7m in 2020, with predictions it will grow by 11.
6 per cent every year for the next decade. There’s even a Michelin-starred restaurant in Yorkshire, The Black Swan at Oldstead, serving canned wine tableside. Read Next How does the UK really feel about tipping? Surprise: we hate it Neither fine wine nor spam made.