The All-American History Of Corn Nuts

Perhaps responsible for a lot of dental work, Corn Nuts has a been an all-American snack for almost 90 years. But before it was commercialized in 1936, its prototype, "parched corn," can be traced back to the first Thanksgiving in 1621 when it was introduced to the Pilgrims by the Wampanoag tribe. Parched corn was similar to popcorn, but the corn kernels were heated just to the point when their hulls crack, and provided sustenance when food was scarce. 

By the 18th century corn was looked down upon as inferior to wheat, until Benjamin Franklin extolled its virtues by publishing corn recipes, including one for parched corn. In the 1840s, thousands of emigrants, seeking farm land, headed west on the Oregon Trail in wagon trains, and it's conjectured that parched corn was the original trail mix. Over the next four decades — from the Civil War to the Great Depression to the Dust Bowl  – parched corn was sometimes the only food that starving people could get. 

When Prohibition ended in 1933, local bars needed snacks to serve alongside cocktails. Olin Huntington, an entrepreneur from Oakland, California, adapted the parched corn recipe and named the salty tidbits Olin's Brown Jug Toasted Corn, calling back to the popular post-Civil War song, "Brown Jug." Huntington sold the corn snack to bars and taverns, whose owners  provided them for free to patrons. But when California passed a law prohibiting free food at bars, Huntington called it quits.

In 1936, Albert Holloway bought Olin Huntington's business, ditched the Brown Jug name, and rebranding them as Cornnuts, which he marketed as a wholesome snack for schoolchildren at five cents a bag. It's unclear how Holloway came up with the name, other than possibly being inspired by a bar patron demanding "those corn nut things." Holloway read about the huge Cuzco corn grown in Peru, and envisioning a larger corn nut, he tried to import it, but was stymied by World War II, and then attempted to grow the Peruvian breed in Oakland. When that failed, he worked to develop a hybrid type of corn, which eventually proved a success in 1965 after his sons had taken over the business. 

Nabisco purchased Cornnuts in 1997, changing its spelling to its present two-word form, and then Kraft Heinz took control after its merger with Nabisco in 2015. Kraft Heinz apparently had a difficult time deciding on its marketing strategy and sold Corn Nuts to Hormel Foods in 2021. Hormel seems to revel in its ownership of Corn Nuts, frequently introducing new flavors, like its newest Loaded Taco, and proudly announced that in 2023, it had set a Guinness World Record for creating the largest piñata, which was a huge 30-meter tall corn cob. Corn Nuts is a timeless American snack, and you could create your own special flavor at home by air-frying canned hominy.