PECAN Shelling Plants Increase With Demand for Cracked Kernels

The demand for pecan kernels during recent years has grown steadily with the development of the pecan industry as a whole. By far the largest portion of the product is absorbed by the confectionery and bakery trade. This growing taste on the part of the consuming public for food products containing the cracked kernels has been the means of promoting the comparatively new industry of pecan cracking.

The extreme difficulty that the few big operators had in quickly absorbing the supply at going prices during years of maximum production has led to a wide expansion of the industry. In 1926, when the total production of unshelled pecans in the United States was estimated at 64,000,000 pounds, in comparison with 30,000,000 in 1925 and 20,500,000 in 1924, these large companies bought and placed in cold storage immense quantities of the unshelled product. At the end of the season hundreds of thousands of pounds still remained in the hands of producers and local merchants. Prices dropped to the extreme low level of the decade of about 8 cents a pound.

The result was that during that year dozens of small cracking establishments sprang up. Such a notable overflow of the cracking industry into the producing districts has taken place that in the important centers of production there is now to be found scarcely a town of 3,000 inhabitants or more without from one to several cracking establishments. Many of these are extremely small plants operated by street vendors, who each day crack only enough nuts to supply their immediate needs and whose total capacity for an entire season probably does not average more than 2 or 3 tons. Others are individuals who find it advantageous to dispose of their own crops by cracking the nuts and marketing the kernels, chiefly by parcel post. Still others are independent operators who crack a carload or more a season, especially during years of large production, but a good many of such plants are branches of the large companies that long have been in business outside the centers of production.

As the small operators, however, usually lack the financial resources and facilities of cold storage necessary to acquire and hold in fit condition a sufficient quantity of nuts for more than a few months, and also lack the business connections essential to extensive sales, they are at a great disadvantage in competition with the large operators. Eventually consolidation of the small operators and the elimination of the weakest is to be expected.

Regardless of competition between the large and small crackers, development of the industry in centers of production is of material.  advantage to the industry as a whole, in that it saves freight charges on the shells and forms an outlet for the cheaper labor that may be had in the small towns of the South, and by holding the larger part of the crop income in the producing areas prices are stabilized and the producer shares in the increased values.  Local communities are also brought into closer contact with the industry, which necessarily has a direct result on community welfare.

Pecan cracking, in fact, has become of great importance to the industry as a means of getting the product to the consumer, for in spite of the high quality of the kernels, consumers will not buy as many pecans when the only way of getting at the kernels is by hand-cracking and extraction.