Violet Witchel Wants You to Think Beans Are Sexy

EDITORS NOTE: ART ADV: With photos.

NEW YORK -- On a recent Sunday, as many New Yorkers slept, Violet Witchel loaded 480 pounds of deli containers filled with beans and accouterment into a Chevy Tahoe, then drove from East Williamsburg to the West Village, where she and a team arranged them into cheerful stacks in a cold case at Pop Up Grocer.

By the time the doors opened at 11 a.m., a line had already started forming. By the time the pop-up ended, two hours later, Witchel, a content creator based in San Francisco, had sold more than 400 so-called Dense Bean Salads, or DBS, a term she coined to describe her fiber-filled medleys, more of a genre than single recipe, at $15 to $22 a pop.

The hashtag #densebeansalad now conjures thousands of videos, each some loose adaptation with legumes, chopped vegetables or protein, seasonings, alliums, herbs and dressing, hold the lettuce.

Fans who reached the front of the line got not only access to a selection of DBS-varietals -- one with grilled steak and chimichurri; another with miso and edamame; a third built on sun-dried tomato in a kind of 1990s salad-bar fever dream -- but also access to Witchel.

Witchel, 26, does not claim to have invented a dish -- “it’s basically just a Greek bean salad,” she said -- but she does seem to have done the impossible: created a TikTok food trend with staying power.

Those who showed up were only the latest example of dense bean-mania. At her recent pop-ups in Philadelphia and Miami, rabid bean-heads snapped up some 700 salads.

Enthusiasts attribute part of the DBS’ appeal to its versatility. Katherine Gross, 31, said that the salads aren’t so much prescriptive as they are a way of life. “I use it as more of an idea template,” she said.

Vaneeza Abbas, 27, a self-described “dense bean girlie” who came to the pop-up for the steak-chimichurri offering, said it was refreshing to follow a creator like Witchel in 2026: “It’s good having health-conscious creators in the Ozempic era not talking about how skinny you can get and how fast.”

Abbas’ sister, Mehreen, 28, said that, to her, “it’s not performative,” adding, “the Dense Bean Salad is inherently affordable. A can of beans can be 89 cents at Target.”

On a visit to the specialty store Kalustyan’s to peruse the vast selection of beans a few days earlier, Witchel attributed the DBS’ longevity to timing and cost: As proteins like beef have become more expensive, she said, beans have remained reliably low priced. At the same time, proteinmaxxing and fibermaxxing have come into vogue.

Walking through the store in a white denim sundress and white sandals, Witchel stopped abruptly in front of a display of speckled white and tobacco-colored beans: “Snowcaps,” she said matter-of-factly. “Those taste like a pinto bean, crossed with a cannellini.” She jutted her chin at a bag of cranberry beans: “Those are delicious in a ham soup.”

We were on the first stop of an exploratory bean crawl throughout the city. Witchel looked more like the face of a perfume campaign than that of an ingredient often evoked as a punchline about flatulence. But her encyclopedic knowledge of beans was unrelenting; so, too, were her takes on internet food.

“The high fiber trend scares me; if you go from not eating a lot of fiber to fibermaxxing, it’s going to tear you up,” she said, sunnily, as she disappeared into an aisle of pulses. Up next, she thinks, “lentils are going to blow up online,” “cabbage will get big again” and “people are going to push toward chewing more.”

Witchel began to post cooking videos on TikTok as a student at Vassar College during the pandemic. The followers -- more than 2 million, she says, by the time she graduated in 2022 -- came well before the Dense Bean Salad.

Growing up in San Francisco with a tech entrepreneur father, she’d been conditioned to suspect that any following would be fleeting. But she started making real money, fast -- she estimated $3,000 a month -- just from the TikTok Creator Fund, and then graduated into brand deals her senior year, balancing economics homework with lucrative videos for companies including Chobani and Ninja Kitchen. The hedge-fund career that felt inevitable no longer was.

Witchel had always consumed a lot of legumes after adopting a gluten-free diet for celiac disease. So eventually she started to post her concoctions. Once she applied the Dense Bean Salad label, they took off.

“’Dense Bean Salad,’” she said. “Sometimes people just scream it at me, at the bar. I’m like, ‘yes, that’s me.’ I love that they know me for that. I could be known for much worse stuff. I saw Elizabeth Holmes once on the street.”

Today, she has more than 3.6 million followers across TikTok and Instagram.

The chief complaint she fields? “’This made me super gassy,’” she said. “I tell them, give it time and slowly integrate beans into your diet.” She regularly searches for herself on Reddit, where criticism includes “out of touch,” “cultural appropriation” and “she filmed herself watching a movie in a theater and I just think that’s such a weird thing to do?”

“It’s true, or it’s not true,” she said. “If it’s not true, I let it roll off my back. If it’s true, I think about whether this is something I should introspect about and change within my content; it’s feedback, if delivered rudely.”

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While she has yet to experience burn out (bean out?), she’s acutely aware that the buzz could fade at any moment -- not just the dense bean-mania, but her whole sphere of influence.

“There will always be someone more interesting than you, or more beautiful than you,” she said, as we walked into the next stop: Lebanese restaurant Balade, in the East Village, for ful medames and a particularly fluffy hummus. Last year, she completed a program at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, California, and, in 2024, she started a Substack. The newsletter -- mainly recipes -- has attracted more than 235,000 followers, of whom more than 10,000 pay $6 per month, Witchel said.

In the meantime, she plots with friends, only half-seriously, about unveiling a consumer packaged good. “I think cheese sticks need a face-lift, the way Chomps gave one to meat sticks,” she said.

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We arrived at the third stop on our bean crawl, the status supermarket Happier Grocery, where Witchel identified a Dense Bean Salad within 90 seconds: a clamshell of white beans, chickpeas, salsa verde and olives, for $11.54. (“Interesting, almost $12 for 8 ounces,” she said. “Mine is $15 for 16 ounces.”) She found it to be well flavored, but mushier than she prefers. (She and her team stop to sharpen their knives four separate times throughout their pop-up prep.)

Soon, she had to go -- she was off to film with an eye health influencer, and then she had to get soaking, for the weekend. Fifty pounds of dried beans awaited.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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