Not long ago, a friend opened a can of Heinz baked beans to feed her children for supper. As she poured the orange slop into a bowl she spotted two brown beans among the hundreds of orange ones.

Right away she called the Heinz customer service line. The woman on the other end apologised and said: “I can see how distressing that must have been for you.” She then explained that the beans get checked twice, once by machine and then by human eye, but that very occasionally the odd (harmless) brown one slips undetected into a can. Within 48 hours vouchers for five cans of beans arrived in the post and my friend pinned them on the fridge to admire them for a bit before cashing them in.