Costco's beef chili is back on shelves — and one of its key ingredients is stirring a debate about what's allowed in the dish

• Costco's beef chili is back — and so is a decades-long debate over the dish's ingredients.
• Chili traditionalists say the recipe should never have beans in it.

A TikToker inadvertently reignited a debate about chili — whether the dish can have beans in it.

In a video posted to Instagram and TikTok on September 27, the account @CostcoHotFinds announced that Costco's beef chili was back on the shelves. The post was neutral on beans without mentioning the ingredient.

"I love this chili," the video's caption read.

But in the comment section, social media users quickly turned the review into a platform for debate, with the main issue being whether a chili with beans is even a chili.

"there's no beans in chilli......I don't know what that is but it's not chilli......" one TikToker wrote. "Still looks pretty good though."

Meanwhile, on Instagram, one person wrote that the dish wasn't a chili, instead calling it a "bean soup with cheese." Several other social media users said Costco's take on the dish wouldn't fly in Texas, where apparently beans aren't allowed in chili.

Texas-based chefs told food and pop-culture website The Takeout in September that chili — known in the state as "Texas Red" — should not include beans.

"In Texas, we hold these things to be true: Texas BBQ is the king, and there are no beans in chili," John Bates, a chef, barbecue pitmaster, an eighth-generation Texan, told the outlet.

While the dish's origins aren't specifically explicitly known, historians believe that 18th-century immigrants from the Canary Islands introduced the recipe to the area that would later become Texas, according to the website What's Cooking America.

The meal has gotten people so heated for so long that in 1967, two writers had a beans-versus-no-beans cook-off in Texas to determine which recipe reined supreme.

The cook-off, Slate reported, became known as the "Great Chili Confrontation."

"To create chili without beans, either added to the pot or served on the side," one of the chili competitors, H. Allen Smith, wrote, "is to flout one of the basic laws of nature."