He’ll Make Noise With the Beans That Don’t

Readers often ask, “Say, are you folks keeping up with the latest on what’s being done to reduce gas you get from eating beans?”

Yes, we are.

In fact, that’s what led me last weekend to the Natural Products Expo West at the Anaheim Convention Center. A hamburger-and-fries guy, I tend to see the natural-foods world as an underground movement. But with producers claiming 2,500 exhibitors and 36,000 attendees for the show, that’s a pretty big underground.

“Low-carb” was everywhere at the Expo, but I also could have explored the worlds of exotic Tazo teas, All-Natural Breath Mints, All-Natural Jerky or, perhaps, the American Palm Oil Council booth.

Instead, I made a beeline for Mark Sterner’s booth. The president of Inland Empire Foods, a Riverside manufacturer of precooked and dried beans, Sterner is an affable guy of 56 who thinks he’s found what everybody’s been looking for -- “the quiet bean.”

If he’s found it, gone would be the fear that eating a plate of beans could lead to potential social embarrassment. Though his product isn’t on the market yet, Sterner says his research indicates that up to 30% of the buying public avoid beans for just that reason and that more than half suffer from bean indigestion.

Working for four years with researchers at La Sierra University in Riverside, Sterner says they’ve developed a “uniquely different process” that eliminates oligosaccharides, the complex sugars behind flatulence. Past industry efforts to produce a quiet bean, he says, failed because scientists either couldn’t remove all the sugars or, if they could, the taste was awful.

The best the industry has done so far, he says, is a pill that bean eaters take to reduce flatulence.

I confirmed that with Lilian Were, an assistant professor of physical science at Chapman University, who concedes the utility of such a bean. “I wouldn’t say it’s a magic bullet,” Were says, “but it is a big thing, because sometimes that’s what affects the consumption of beans.”

As excited as Sterner is about the potential breakthrough, he still has some thinking to do on the marketing end of things.

“I think you have to find a way to not come out and say exactly what it does,” he says. “It’s like taking something you don’t talk about and putting something in a form that’s acceptable to the public.”

Think Viagra.

But while he mulls a marketing strategy -- or, whether to have one -- Sterner offered to send samples to potential buyers at the Expo. “We’re going to run it out there and see what happens,” he tells me. “It could very well be the public isn’t quite ready for it yet.”

Sterner isn’t viewing the bean as a make-or-break item for his company, which has been around since 1985. “It’s not a big, big deal,” he says, “but it’s like anything else -- what you do as a company is crack out with as many new things as you can in a year. You develop 20 items and maybe two of them are right time, right place with the public.”

He’ll target natural-foods markets and see if, like other products, it finds mainstream appeal. “If it catches on,” he says, “it’s a big number,” referring to sales potential.

At minimum, it seems to me, the time-honored “musical fruit” would need a nickname change.

Am I missing something? If tofu and soymilk found a niche, what could stop the quiet bean?

Sterner wants to stay cool, but I can tell he’s daring to dream: “I don’t know if you know this,” he says, “but even animals have trouble with flatulence. It’ll kill a cow, if it gets bloated.”

I stop him there, asking to save that conversation for another day.*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana. parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.