Every time I chew one of the freakishly large grains, I think I’m going to break a tooth.
But I don’t and find myself reaching into the bag for another handful.
CornNuts are perhaps the most surprisingly popular snack in America. And they actually have an interesting history. Grab a bag and I’ll tell you.
Where in the world do they find corn that big?
Peru via Salina Valley, CA, by the way. But we’ll get to that shortly.
Albert Holloway first sold whole fried and salted kernels of corn in the 1930s under the name Olin’s Brown Jug Toasted Corn (don’t you just love old product names?). , from Texas common field corn.
Then, in one of those world-changing moments, one day shortly before World War II, Mr. Holloway saw an article in the local newspaper about corn in Peru that had kernels larger than a quarter of it.
The corn was called giant Cuzco and was grown by farmers 9,000 feet up in the rugged Andes mountains. It can still be seen served cooked in Peru and in Peruvian restaurants in the Americas.
It didn’t take long for Holloway to make a deal and start importing the corn to make his CornNuts. But prices were high and supplies were always short, so he tried to grow corn at home. The problem was that no one knew how to do it.
Enter Donald Shaver, a plant breeder from Illinois. He heard about the corn growing problem and contacted Holloway to offer him a deal. If CornNuts were to fund his ongoing research, he would work exclusively on the project. In 1963, Shaver finally cracked the code, so to speak. It seems that the weather was the problem and that brought them to the Salinas Valley in central California, near Monterey. It has an almost perfect match with the native growing region and the corn thrived. It pays to have a big country to work in.
CornNuts moved all production to California and the rest is history.
Go ahead, grab another handful.
