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Fray Bentos

Sadly, many of you seem to love the tinned travesty which is Fray Bentos. Ah, well, you'll learn. But we have a duty to you, the pie-lovers of the world, and so, much as looking after a dog involves cleaning up a lot of poo, or being the caretaker on the International Space Station means eating all your pie out of vacuum bags, looking after you lot involves serving you up some information about your favourite pies.

the basic stuff

As yet, the Fray Bentos brand doesn’t appear to have its own website. Our crack team of researchers spent hours looking through the nether reaches of Google, but admitted defeat. Come to think of it we haven't seen them since. Maybe they just got bored and wandered off.

Anyway, the Fray Bentos brand is currently owned by Premier Foods. Who do have a website, but all you'll find is one measly picture of a pie. Tcha!

The full pie range, as far as we can make out, includes:

minced beef and onion
steak and kidney pudding
steak and ale
steak and mushroom
steak and three vegetables (if you're really unlucky, two peas and a bean)
chicken and mushroom
chicken curry

If you've got a problem with your pie, don't call us because we'll just laugh at you. Get in touch with the Fray Bentos Customer Service line: 0800 7310989. Or you can write to their head office: Premier Foods, Premier House, Griffiths Way, St Albans, AL1 2RE.

the story so far

The Fray Bentos brand was launched in 1899, although we understand that not all their pies have been around since then.

Fray Bentos is actually a town in Uruguay, South America, and interestingly (and coincidentally?) its other major export is bleached eucalyptus pulp. The town started off in the corned beef and meat extract business, so the key ingredients of meat and can were already present. After a while some bright spark had the idea of encasing the meat in pastry before it was encased in steel, which some might call overkill, but nevertheless a whole new business was born.

The pies themselves have been made in Britain since 1958, after Uruguay got bored with the whole pastry thing. The brand was bought by Campbell's (as in the pop art soup) in 1993, and moved to Premier Foods in 2006.

useless facts you need to know

£16m of Fray Bentos pies were sold in 2002, making them practically a currency. Actually, that would be brilliant, wouldn't it? You'd have to rent a skip to put down a deposit on a telly, and buying penny chews would be something of a problem, but think what it would do for the nation's wallet manufacturing industry.
When Prince Charles visited Uruguay in 1999, he said he remembered eating Fray Bentos corned beef “until it came out of my ears”. That's presumably more in his case than for an ordinarily-eared person.

Fray Bentos

the basic stuff

the story so far

useless facts you need to know

useless Fray Bentos links