Baked beans is a dish consisting of beans baked (or, despite the name, often stewed) in a sauce.

Traditional cuisines of many regions claim such recipes as typical specialities, for example:

Boston baked beans
Jersey bean crock
Guernsey bean jar
Cassoulet
Feijoada
New England baked beans
Quebec-style baked beans are often prepared with maple syrup.
British cuisine claims beans on toast as a teatime favourite, and baked beans may form part of a Full breakfast
Beans cooked in barbecue sauce (or a similarly flavoured sauce) are a traditional side-dish in a United States barbecue.
"Frank and beans", a recipe where hot dogs are cut up and cooked in the same sauce as the baked beans. Also referred to as "Beanee Weenee", the brand name under which it is sold by Van Camp's.
Most commercial tinned baked beans such as Heinz are made from haricot beans, also known as Boston Beans or Navy Beans, a variety of Phaseolus vulgaris, and sold in a sauce. In the United Kingdom, tomato sauce is most commonly used. Also, baked beans should not be confused with Pork and Beans which are also navy beans in tomato sauce, but are not sweetened with brown sugar or flavoured with onions like baked beans.

The popularity of baked beans may be due to the fact they are cheap to make and buy. In the United Kingdom, for example, supermarkets may sell store brand baked beans for less than twenty pence a tinned can[1] (Baked beans are a classic example of a "loss leader", a product sold by supermarkets for an abnormally low price, often less than cost. This is done because some products are thought by marketeers to be widely used as benchmarks by consumers to judge how cheap a supermarket is. Another example of this phenomenon is white sliced bread) , but some premium organic brands may be as expensive as £1.50[1] as well as some non-organic premium brands