Swiss Green Beans: Cheap Ways to Use the Glut

Swiss green beans (Buschbohnen) hit their annual price floor from mid-July through the end of August, when the domestic open-field harvest peaks at roughly CHF 3–4 per kilo — often under CHF 3 on Aktion. Buy a big batch, blanch and freeze whatever you can't eat fresh, and the summer glut turns into meals that keep for months.

At CHF 3.50/kg in season against CHF 9–14/kg for air-freighted imports in midwinter, blanching and freezing 8 kg now saves a household around CHF 50 over the off-season — from a single vegetable, and with nothing left to rot in the drawer.

When are Swiss green beans at their cheapest

Green beans are a high-summer crop. The Swiss open-field season runs from roughly late June to early October, but the sweet spot for price is mid-July to the end of August, when beans from the Seeland, Ticino and the Rhône valley all come in at once. Supply runs ahead of demand, and the shelf price sinks to its lowest point of the year.

Expect CHF 3–4 per kilo for loose Swiss beans at the peak, with promotional weeks at Coop, Migros, Lidl and Aldi pushing that under CHF 3. Compare that with April, when the only beans on the shelf are flown in from Kenya or Egypt at three to four times the price. Beans are genuinely cheap for about eight weeks a year, and this is the window.

Are local beans really cheaper than imported ones

In season, decisively yes. Swiss beans travel a short distance, need no refrigerated air freight and arrive in volume, so the in-season price sits well below the imported alternative. Out of season the maths flips: with no domestic crop, retailers fall back on beans from North Africa, Spain or Kenya, and the shelf price climbs to CHF 9–14/kg — green beans are one of the more transport-intensive vegetables when they have to fly.

The table below tracks the rough shape of the year. Read the numbers as a seasonal pattern rather than today's exact tag; the curve is what matters, and it repeats every year.

For where the rest of the harvest sits in the same weeks, our high-summer vegetable price guide covers sweet corn, peperoni and aubergine alongside beans.

How do you freeze green beans so they keep

Green beans freeze better than almost any summer vegetable, but only if you blanch them first. Skip the blanching and the enzymes stay active: the beans turn limp, grey and faintly bitter within a month. Blanched properly, they hold their colour, snap and flavour for eight to twelve months. The whole job takes about twenty minutes for a few kilos.

1. Top, tail and cut. Trim the stem ends and cut the beans into the length you actually cook with, usually 3–4 cm pieces.
2. Boil briefly. Drop them into rapidly boiling water for exactly 3 minutes. Work in batches so the water never stops boiling.
3. Shock in ice water. Lift the beans straight into a bowl of ice-cold water for another 3 minutes. This stops the cooking and locks in the green.
4. Dry thoroughly. Drain and pat dry with a tea towel. Wet beans freeze into one solid icy brick.
5. Open-freeze, then bag. Spread the beans on a tray, freeze for an hour until firm, then tip them into labelled freezer bags. They stay loose, so you pour out exactly what a meal needs.

Frozen this way, beans go straight from bag to pan with no thawing. Add them to soups, stir-fries and gratins directly from frozen.

What can you cook with a glut of beans

Plain boiled beans as a side get dull by the third night. Four cheap, filling dishes stretch a big batch across a week without repeating yourself:

• Swiss bean stew (Bohneneintopf): beans, potatoes, onion and a Cervelat or two simmered in stock. Feeds four for well under CHF 8 and tastes better reheated the next day.
• Green bean and tomato salad: blanched beans, halved cherry tomatoes, a sharp vinaigrette and a handful of herbs. A CHF 3 side that carries a whole apéro table.
• Beans with pasta and pesto: the Ligurian trick — boil beans and diced potato in with the pasta, then stir through pesto. One pot, roughly CHF 2 a portion.
• Garlic-braised beans: slow-cooked in olive oil, garlic and a spoon of passata until soft and sweet. A pantry dish that turns a surplus into something you actually crave.

Beans slot in around whatever else the season is throwing at you. When the courgette pile takes over, our zucchetti glut recipes use the same blanch-and-freeze logic for the other vegetable no Swiss garden can keep up with.

How much does buying beans in season actually save

Take a household that eats green beans most weeks of the year, say 1 kg a week. In season at CHF 3.50/kg and out of season at CHF 10/kg, the gap is real money:

• Buy and freeze 8 kg across July and August at CHF 3.50/kg → CHF 28.
• The same 8 kg bought as winter imports at CHF 10/kg → CHF 80.
• Freezing the summer glut instead saves about CHF 50 across the off-season — from one vegetable.

Spread the same habit across the whole summer harvest — beans, courgettes, tomatoes, peppers — and seasonal buying quietly reshapes the grocery bill. Our piece on why eating seasonally cuts your Swiss grocery bill runs the numbers across the full year.

Buying a glut without wasting it

The one risk of bulk-buying beans is watching half of them wilt in the drawer. Nationally that is no small thing: Swiss households throw out around 119 kg of food per person every year, roughly 38% of the country's total food waste, and fresh vegetables are among the biggest contributors, according to the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (BAFU).

Beans bought to freeze dodge that trap completely: process them the day you buy them and nothing spoils. For the portion you keep fresh, store them unwashed in a perforated bag in the fridge drawer and use them within four or five days. Blanch anything you won't reach in time rather than letting it turn.

How Eini keeps you ahead of the season

Knowing beans are cheap in August is the easy part. Remembering it in the aisle, catching the week they dip under CHF 3, and lining that up with what you were going to cook anyway is the part that slips. That legwork is what Eini's algorithm handles: it tracks live prices and Aktionen across Coop, Migros, Lidl, Aldi, Denner and Aligro, flags when seasonal produce hits its floor, and folds the result into a meal plan and grocery list.

So the seasonal pattern in this article stops being something to remember and becomes a buy signal that arrives on its own — beans in July, squash in October, and every glut in between.