Peanuts on the bench for now
With no fans to buy them in ballparks, tons lie in cold storage.
Classic stadium food like garlic fries, Dippin’ Dots and pumpcheese nachos are touchstones of something that feels heartbreakingly far away this summer: the thrill of being part of a huge crowd sharing a singular experience.
Within the pantheon of concessions sidelined by the pandemic, ballpark peanuts stand out. Roasted in their shells and tossed into the stands with great ritual and panache, peanuts have been part of the national pastime for nearly 125 years.
They have more cultural heft than hot dogs, and a more onerous coronavirus tale, too.
Today, most of the 2.3 million pounds of in-shell peanuts consumed during a typical baseball season are languishing in cold storage, waiting — like the fans — for an opening day at the park that is unlikely to come. Baseball teams are trying to find a way to schedule a season, but there will be no one in the stands to shell out $4 or $5 for a bag of peanuts.
The pandemic shut down the season before it started. Teams postponed or canceled orders.
Farmers, who had harvested peanuts for the 2020 baseball season in October, had already shipped them to the roasters and been paid.
“We are basically left holding the peanuts,” said Tom Nolan, vice president of sales and marketing for Hampton Farms, the North Carolina-based peanut and peanut butter company that roasts and packages most of the peanuts sold at baseball stadiums.
The race is on to figure out what to do with all those special peanuts, which are expensive to grow and delicate to harvest.
Only a certain peanut bred for the proper size and the look of its shell makes the cut for the ballpark trade. It’s called the Virginia, grown in that state but also in the Carolinas, Texas and, to a lesser degree, New Mexico. (Only 14% of all the nation’s peanut crop are Virginias. Most are runner peanuts, which are ground into peanut butter.)
Of those big Virginias, about one-fifth end up at the ballpark. The rest are sold at grocery stores, gas stations and, at least before the pandemic, restaurants like the Five Guys hamburger chain, which handed them out free.
Fans might not think too much about how peanuts look or the quality of their oil, but Dan Ward does. A farmer in Clarkton, North Carolina, he grows jumbo Virginias in the southeast corner of the state.
They’re not the easiest peanut to grow. The delicate shells crack more easily than the runners destined for peanut butter, so pulling them from the ground takes more time and patience. Growing them takes a special touch, too.
“You have to plant them in a loamy soil with enough sand so the hull is bright,” he said. “I like for them to shine in the bag.”
About 400 of the 1,650 acres he plants every year are given over to ballpark peanuts. Last year’s crop — the one sitting in storage at Hampton Farms right now — was a particularly good one.
“Those peanuts should taste awesome,” he said. “When you do get a crop like that, you want people to enjoy them.”
He had already sold that crop when the country began shutting down in March. But he didn’t escape the effects of the shutdown. By late April, with the coronavirus turning agriculture on its head, he had to calculate how many ballpark peanuts to plant in May for the 2021 baseball season.
Meanwhile, the companies that bought those in-shell peanuts for what had been a robust baseball and restaurant market are trying to figure out what to do with them all.
“That’s going to be a problem,” said Bob Parker, chief executive officer of the National Peanut Board. “You can put them in cold storage for a while and hope things will resume, but it doesn’t look so promising.”
The peanut board is scrambling, plotting a round of promotions featuring free bags of in-shell peanuts that will remind armchair baseball fans that they don’t need to wait to return to the stadium to crack some shells. Some grocery stores are planning promotions to move more bags of team-branded peanuts.
There are other rays of hope. During the first months of the pandemic, raw in-shell peanuts started selling out at Walmart and other retailers. Nolan thinks some of the demand might have come from people who wanted to try roasting their own at home, and from others who have been creating backyard “squirrel restaurants” — tiny picnic tables and bowls of raw shelled peanuts for squirrels.
An even bigger boost came from homebound snackers. Retail sales for shelled Virginias were up nearly 15% in May over a year earlier, largely because people bought cans of them in March for what Parker called “the initial pantry filling.” (“We don’t like to say ‘hoarding,’” he said.)
For those who make a living growing and processing peanuts, the real hero of the pandemic is peanut butter. March sales jumped by 75% over those from the same month a year earlier. They slowed in April, but were still up.
Peanut butter was an easy solution for a nation that found itself suddenly eating every meal at home. It’s also cheap protein at a time when the nation is facing deep unemployment and increased poverty. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and organizations like Feeding America buy a lot of it.
“We can’t make enough peanut butter for FEMA and the food banks,” Nolan said. “That’s a very sad and sobering comment about our economy.”
In a way, it makes his work more meaningful. “Everyone here feels patriotic in a way about work right now,” he said. “We’re part of what keeps things going.”