Beer Nuts: Two words that say it all

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Beer Nuts Brand Snacks

Beer Nuts are more than just a snack, they are a part of popular culture. Walk into a bar or store anywhere in the country, and in several foreign countries, and you'll likely spot their familiar, red-and- white, oval logo. Ninety percent of the American public recognizes their name, according to studies by Beer Nuts Inc.

The bar snacks of yore, such as peanuts-in-the-shell, popcorn and beef jerky, shared two common characteristics. One, they were salty, and two, you could eat them with one hand, so as to hold your drink in the other. Then came Beer Nuts, the first flavored snack nut. While Beer Nuts were simple to eat, their taste went beyond salt, combining the slight bitterness of peanuts-in-the-skin with a sweet-salty glaze. "Slightly Sweet, Lightly Salted" is a Beer Nuts slogan, as true today as it was 60 years ago.

It's the name that grabs people's attention and sticks in their memories: Beer Nuts. Two words that say it all. In fact, the name is almost too perfect. Like Band-Aids and Kleenex, the name Beer Nuts has taken on the taint of the generic, which is why the company branded the name a few years ago. "Some people thought it was any nut you ate with beer," said Jim Tipton, manager of marketing communications.

Which came first, the nuts or the name? Beer Nuts were created years before they received their now-famous moniker, in a Bloomington, Illinois, candy store called the Caramel Crisp Shop. The shop was better known for popcorn balls and candy than peanuts, which it sold by the scoop primarily to encourage sales of orange drink. The nuts' original name was "Redskins" (in perhaps the only politically correct use of the word), since they were -- and are -- roasted and glazed with the skins on.

In 1937 Russell Shirk persuaded his father to buy the candy shop, where he worked after school, and with it the recipe for Redskins. After a few years they moved the shop to a bigger building and began focusing more attention on the nuts. They eventually began bagging the nuts, christened "Shirk's Glazed Peanuts," for sale at a local liquor store, but the nuts were still only a small part of the business. In 1953 a potato chip distributor named Eldridge Brewster talked Shirk into packaging the nuts on a larger scale, so Brewster could sell them to taverns. Brewster dubbed them "beer nuts," and the catchy name stuck.

"At that time, taverns didn't have a whole lot of food offerings," Tipton said. "The nuts took right off." They sold especially well in bars and taverns, where Brewster promoted them as enabling tavern owners to sell more beer. By 1960 Beer Nuts were available in all 50 states, and by 1970 the company was producing 10 million pounds of the nuts a year.

Beer Nuts are still made only in Bloomington. Russell Shirk's son, Jim, is the company president, and Russell serves as chairman. The product line today includes cashews and almonds as well as peanuts, but peanuts still account for 80-85 percent of the Beer Nuts produced.

The home of Beer Nuts is a spanking-clean, 100,000-square-foot building, where the company moved operations in 1973. A cold storage room holds the Virginia Extra Large and Southeastern Jumbo Runner peanuts, African and Indian cashews and California almonds until they're ready to be turned into Beer Nuts. All the nuts are shelled and cleaned before they arrive. Because peanuts grow underground, they are sorted extra carefully -- first by machine, then by human eyes and hands -- to remove any stones, stems or shells.

Once cleaned, the nuts are roasted and glazed using a secret process. The ingredients that go into the glaze are simple: oil, corn syrup and salt. (Contrary to a common misconception, there is no beer in Beer Nuts.) It's the process that makes Beer Nuts special, and the kitchen is off-limits to prying eyes, but the enticing aroma of Beer Nuts-in-the-making lets visitors know what's going on behind those doors. "The Beer Nuts process cooks in the glaze," Tipton said. "It's not just sprinkled on top."

The roasted, glazed nuts travel down pipes and through chutes to the packaging equipment in the room below, where they are canned or bagged, boxed and hauled away for shipping. Everything is made to order. About 80 people work at the plant, with a few more on during the busy seasons -- the holidays and summer months.

The Beer Nuts plant mirrors a bottling microbrewery in several ways. It's filled with conveyors of all kinds. The packaging equipment resembles a labeler, with bags and cans spinning around like bottles do, and the equipment is gravity-fed. Box-making machines are similar to six-pack folders.

The parallels to a craft brewery extend beyond the nuts and bolts to less tangible connections. Beer Nuts is a small, family-owned company that competes with large multinational operations, such as Nabisco-owned Planters, and has to fight off attempts to infringe on its trademark. Just as large brewing concerns have historically gobbled up smaller breweries, large food corporations have approached Beer Nuts with takeover in mind. But Tipton said Beer Nuts Inc. doesn't see as many offers as it used to. "We don't have the profit margin of other snack foods," he said.

Beginning in the late 1970s Beer Nuts came up against intense competition from Anheuser- Busch-owned Eagle Snacks, which started the "honey-roasted nut" craze. A-B's sale of Eagle Snacks to Procter & Gamble last year helped Beer Nuts' sales, which were up slightly in 1996 after a few flat years. "It opened up some opportunities," Tipton said.

A shift in Beer Nuts' sales reflects the shift in Americans' drinking preferences from the local watering hole to the home. Sales to bars and taverns have dwindled over the years, and today, most Beer Nuts are sold in convenience stores, discount stores, chain drugstores and supermarkets. "In the '50s and '60s there was a bar on every corner," Tipton said. "Now, where five or six used to be, there's one. A lot that have survived have opened a grill or restaurant." Brewpubs have not been big customers, since most of them are restaurants. "They're not as open to selling snack foods," Tipton said. The corporation would like to get back into the tavern trade on a larger scale, and fills small orders for taverns that aren't covered by Beer Nuts distributors.

Beer Nuts' strongest markets are California, the Midwest and the East Coast. "The East Coast gets so competitive, but they're big nut-eaters," Tipton said. The worst market is the Southwest, where "peanuts in general just don't sell as well."

The company isn't large enough for big-budget national advertising, so it relies on creative marketing. Beer Nuts sponsors a professional bass fisherman and motorcycle races, and local distributors sponsor softball teams. As with many small breweries, word-of-mouth is Beer Nuts' best selling tool. References to Beer Nuts are everywhere, from the comics pages to television. Besides "Cheers," which had an advertising campaign that actually referred to Norm, Cliff, et.al, as "Beer Nuts," the snacks have appeared on "Murphy Brown" and been mentioned by David Letterman. When the market expanded to other countries, the name and logo were kept the same -- no "Cerveza Nuezes" or "Bire Noix." "Beer Nuts" says "America" to folks from Japan to Argentina, and that's a strong selling point.

Like the more conservative, and many of the longest-lived, microbreweries, Beer Nuts Inc. has been cautious about introducing new products. "One of the things that always kept us from jumping in and out of items, is that we always felt Beer Nuts were unique," Tipton said. "They're not a commodity item, like honey-roasted nuts. A lot of people do honey-roasted."

In response to the consumer interest in lowfat snacks, Beer Nuts Brand Snacks recently introduced CrunchNuts. CrunchNuts are peanuts coated with flavored dough, which, while not lowfat, contain half the fat per serving of regular roasted peanuts, because they are not cooked in oil and the dough is fat-free. They come in sesame, Cajun and honey mustard flavors, and are currently in limited distribution. Another new product, Old Fashioned Kettle Cooked Peanuts, are skinless, salted versions of the legume.

If there's one thing craft brewers can learn from the success of Beer Nuts, it's that a high-quality product can only go so far without marketing. Without the Beer Nuts name and logo, the Shirk family might still be selling nuts out of the back room of a candy store.

"The reason it plays so well, is there's something kind of humorous about Beer Nuts," Tipton said. "They're blue-collar, everyday snacks people can relate to. Planters Peanuts just doesn't have that connotation."

The Beer Nuts plant is not open to the public, but it has a gift shop that sells a variety of merchandise featuring the Beer Nuts logo, including clothing, glassware, playing cards, fishing lures, golfballs and, of course, nuts. For a brochure, call 800-BEERNUT.

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