There has been a growing amount of research in recent months looking into and trying to improve the structure and make-up of a class favourite: white bread. This latest initiative is called ‘beans in toast’, and it’ using faba beans (otherwise known as fava beans or broad beans) to make the staple more nutritious.

“We’ve chosen faba beans because they’re very particularly nutrient rich,” Julie Lovegrove, leading researcher on the project and professor of human nutrition at the University of Reading in England, told Popular Science.

So, in an effort to increase the nutrition levels of white bread, which is preferred by millions around the world, the researchers added flour made from the faba beans to the bread, which turned out rather similar to the supermarket shelf staple it was intended to emulate.

“It tastes very similar [to white bread]; it looks very similar,” Julie said.

“It’s slightly darker in colour and doesn’t rise slightly as much as the white bread. But we are at the beginning of this project, so those are the challenges that we’re going to overcome. We want to make it as identical to the commercial white bread as we can.”

The UK-based researchers are also interested in making sustainable products with lower carbon footprints.

“We’re using homegrown pulses. There’s a big drive to increase the growth of food within the UK to reduce miles travelled of the foods themselves,” Julie explained.

The beans in toast team will be able to further their research into making nutritious and fibre-rich white bread in the future, as they have been awarded £2 million to continue their work. Hopefully, this will soon mean that fibre-rich white bread will be as ubiquitous as regular white bread is now.