Mark Wagner
Special to ICT
Sara Factor recalls the moment that food company Saucy Spoon reached out to make a licensing deal with her daughter, Peyton “Beans” Factor, a gifted collegiate golfer.
“A complete surprise, shock,” she told ICT. “Followed by, ‘Shut up! No way!’”
The company wanted to negotiate a contract with the young golfer for a Name, Image and Likeness contract, known as an NIL, to sell their product — beans.
Factor, Chickasaw, a rising golf star who committed last year to play Division 1 golf at Manhattan University in New York, caught the attention of the company after influencer Bunkie Perkins began a social media campaign to promote the idea that Factor was a candidate for the growing NIL market for college athletes.
With her talent for golf and a name like Beans, Factor caught the attention of more than a million viewers from Golf Oklahoma to Barstool Sports, TikTok and X, formerly Twitter.
“It was last January,” Sara Factor recounted. “My friend called and said a story that mentioned Beans was getting millions of likes.”
The folks at Saucy Spoon and their ad agency, space150, took notice.
“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us,” Jilliann DeLawyer, the senior director of marketing for Saucy Spoon, told ICT. “We are all about beans.”
The Saucy Spoon parent company, Faribault Foods, includes Saucy Spoons Baked Beans and more than a half-dozen other brands of foods – many of which also include beans. The company, formed by the merger in 2014 of Faribault Foods and Arizona Canning Company, is based in Faribault, Minnesota, with a manufacturing and distribution facility in Tucson, Arizona.
The company had never considered an NIL sponsorship, but the leadership at Faribault Foods got on board quickly.
“Serendipitous to say the least,” DeLawyer said. “The more we learned about Beans and her family, how delightful they all are, the more we were convinced this was a good partnership.”
While details are private, the multi-year contract between Saucy Spoon and the Factor family is not trivial. When ICT reached the family, Beans was treating her mother with a trip to the Oklahoma-Alabama football playoff.
A true trophy hunter
Factor earned her nickname as a child, her mother said.
“When she was 3 years old, maybe even younger, my grandmother, Sue Burris, babysat her and fed her beans every day,” Sara Factor said. “She had a hearty appetite for beans as a tyke. She became so well-known as Beans that her enrollment papers (which used her first name Peyton) at school would get lost.”
The family welcomed the attention from Saucy Spoon.
“As Native people, we’re often taught, don’t get in the limelight,” Sara Factor said. “A lot of it stems from grandparents from the past. As Native, you’re not supposed to brag about yourself. But the tribes have grown. Before you weren’t Indian. Now you’re Indian. Now it’s ok. And if we don’t root for them, if we don’t cheer for them, who will?”
As her family cheered, Beans racked up wins in golf.
“She is a true trophy hunter,” her mother said.
Lots of driving
For many talented athletes, parental support is critical. There’s little surprise that Beans is not the only Oklahoma state champion in the family.
Her brother, Wyatt Factor – aka Boomer – was an Oklahoma state champion in baseball. Bean’s sister,Taylor, was a two-time Oklahoma state champion in softball. Just above Beans in birth order, Elijah was an Oklahoma state champion in basketball. Beans also has two younger siblings, Elliot, 6, and Goose, 4.
Jimpsey Factor, Bean’s father, remembers a lot of driving. Although there’s a country club in their hometown of Ada, Oklahoma, they would go to a driving range in Norman for golf.
“It was just too expensive,” Jimpsey Factor said. “So we’d go to Norman and she would practice sometimes every other day … We were taking her to Norman from when she was about six.”
Beans began to win tournaments before she had turned 10, and when she got to high school, her dad recalls that she was a key reason that Ada High School adopted golf.
“The golf team was pretty much nonexistent until she got there,” he said. “Maybe one girl, two girls would come out for the team. That’s all they ever had … Now golf is big.”
With Beans aboard, the Ada high school team won the state tournament in her sophomore year. She transferred in her junior year to Sequoyah, where, surprise, the team won the state tournament. In her senior year, she won the Oklahoma statewide individual medal for low score.
Licensing deals
After years of lawsuits and negotiations, the National Collegiate Athletic Association began to allow student athletes to receive money for the use of their name, image and likeness beginning in July 2021.
While there is no reliable count of women with NIL income, the most active NIL deal-makers are most often for women in basketball, softball, soccer, and gymnastics. Combined with the fact that Native American athletes make up less than 1 percent of NCAA Division I athletes, Factor’s NIL in women’s golf is all the more impressive.
Coach Keith Prokop, who oversees the Manhattan Jaspers golf teams for men and women, said that NIL contracts “are definitely a different world than I’m used to with the landscape of coaching golf, which sometimes doesn’t get the flowers it deserves. So I’m happy for them to find a way to shine.”
DeLawyer, with Saucy Spoon, said the company was careful in reaching out.
“We approached Beans directly to see if she was interested in an NIL partnership,” DeLawyer said. “When developing the agreement we had to make sure we were compliant with state and school rules. When Faribault and Beans were both happy with the arrangement, we then submitted it for review/approval from both the NCAA and Manhattan University.”
Above the mean
As Beans Factor is not your average golfer, Saucy Spoon varieties are not your average beans.
“We spent a lot of time talking to consumers about how we could improve baked beans, and the answer was clear: ‘Give me more flavor,’” said DeLawyer. “So we did. We developed flavors like applewood smoked bacon, jalapeño bourbon, sweet hickory, and spicy roasted chipotle. Our newest flavor is Korean style barbeque.”
Parent company, Faribault Foods, which includes Saucy Spoons Baked Beans with more than a half-dozen other food brands, was formed by a merger in 2014 of Faribault Foods and Arizona Canning Company. It is based in Faribault, Minnesota, with a manufacturing and distribution facility in Tucson, Arizona. Products are available in groceries across the U.S. and on Amazon.com.
DeLawyer said that baked beans have been a staple in American cuisine for generations, and that Saucy Spoon’s innovations have introduced new flavors to the grocery aisles and attracted more than a million new households to baked beans.
They are also innovating in the NIL space, and could not pass on an opportunity to have Beans promote their beans.
“We are just happy to have met Beans and her family,” DeLawyer said. “At the same time, we want her to focus on her studies, golfing, and just generally enjoy being at college as much as possible, so we’ll probably shoot footage only once or twice a year.”
Good start
In her first fall season at Manhattan, Factor finished in the top 10 at two tournaments and combined with her teammates to record Manhattan’s first-ever win at the Evann Parker Memorial in October. During that win, the team senior Nawel Ben Latief received support from Beans, who put together a near-perfect second round.
Prokop, the coach, remains impressed by his young team and their desire to learn.
“We are a very young team and a talented team that needs to become wiser in how we approach our play and build confidence,” he said.
Among the team members is Factor’s long-time golf colleague and friend Maddison Long, Navajo and Coeur d’Alene, who is a sophomore at Manhattan. Both developed through programs like the U.S. Golf Association qualifiers, NB3 Elite Golf and Nike’s N7 program. And both appear to be adjusting to big city life.
Their moms told ICT of a shopping trip to midtown. Beans and Long came on a QR code sponsored by the city in Times Square. They clicked on it and, lo and behold, their surprised faces appeared on the towering screen above the New Year’s Eve ball drop. That jumbotron is often called the ‘#1 billboard in the world’ for its visibility.
The Manhattan Lady Jaspers begin the spring season March 8 in Orlando at Orange Tree Country Club.
Mark Wagner is a golf historian and the founding director of the Binienda Center for Civic Engagement at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. His book, “Native Links, the Surprising History of Our First People in Golf,” was published in 2024 and is available from Back Nine Pressand Amazon. He can be reached at markgwagner@charter.net.