Dr Colin Leakey hopes that the headline sitting above this piece isn't "Wind of change for beans" or some variant thereon. For 35 years, he has been pursuing a quest to breed a more digestible (and thus less flatulence-inducing) bean and has occasionally become a figure of fun, not least 10 years ago when he patented a "Flatometer" to measure how much gas was produced by eating beans (think two balloons and a tube up the bottom). "My family were embarrassed and I gained a certain amount of notoriety," he says. "But I think people have stopped laughing now."

The laughter may have ceased because Leakey's beans, which are grown in Essex, are already being sold to food companies supplying pubs and restaurants, and now he hopes to get them into supermarkets too, possibly by linking up with the Get Real brand. "It's a nutrition story, a good-news story," he says. "There is a lot of serious interest now."

The 71-year-old's relationship with beans began when he was working in Uganda in 1969. "I was challenged by nutritionists to find beans which were more digestible by babies," he recalls. "Ugandan mothers were being encouraged by the government to feed beans to their babies, but the mothers said the beans were not digestible. Doctors thought the beans were perfectly digestible but babies got diarrhoea and indigestion when they were fed them. The doctors were wrong and the mothers were right."

Idi Amin's coup brought a sudden end to Leakey's research in Uganda but 10 years later, while working in Chile, he discovered the bean equivalent of the holy grail. Called manteca beans, they were lauded by the traders selling them in the marketplace as "beans for the rich man's table". They are easy to digest and don't cause wind, but are lower yielding and won't grow in the UK. Naturally, Leakey spent the next decade developing varieties that could be grown in Britain, keeping himself in toast by offering advice to food companies on a wide variety of plantlife. Yet his problems in making his beans commercially available were only just beginning.

"The last 20 years have been a long and difficult haul," he says now. "People find stories about wind and gas extremely funny, and don't see the serious side. There is a very long chain from being a plant breeder to getting them on to people's plates. If you are a multinational with a lot of money you can do it; if you are a one-man-band plant breeder/biologist and have come up with a bean that is more digestible, it's very tough. It was difficult to get funding and I had to put a lot of my own money in. I've been a financial disaster. But I've never been in business to make money; I've been in business to develop ideas. If I wanted to make money I should have been a computer salesman."

Should Heinz be quaking? No, says Leakey. Small-scale production, lower yields and consequently higher prices mean this will always be a niche market. After 35 years of toil, he is not opposed to putting his own name on the label. "Some people say they should be associated with my name," he admits, "and there is a suggestion that they might be called 'Colin Leakey special manteca beans'." Somehow, despite the fact that Dr Leakey has spent half a lifetime creating them, you feel the marketers will knock that idea on the head. But as long as they don't call them "Lo-Fart Beans" he'll be happy.