Western Nut Company is a food and drink brand headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was founded in 1966.
Western Nut keeps about a dozen people on staff most of the year, and by Christmas that number can swell to nearly 100. Tens of thousands of gift boxes leave the downtown Salt Lake City roaster each holiday season, and co-owner Loren Mercer calls it their Super Bowl.
Wellington McDonald and Helen Bean started the company in April 1966. New owners moved the roasting and the storefront downtown in the 1980s, to 434 South 300 West. The nuts are still oil roasted in small batches, the 1966 way, for a lighter roast and a gentler crunch, then rested in boxes built to draw out the extra oil.
None of the nuts grow here. Almonds come from California and pecans from the southern states. The cashews grow in Africa and are processed overseas, so the Salt Lake part is the roasting. Mercer, a former math teacher, came in to run the finances for his father-in-law in 2007 and bought the company with his brothers Darin and Lee in 2018. "I am not an entrepreneur," he told Salt Lake Sideways. "I just took what worked and didn't let it die."
Paul's Brittle began in 1961, and Western Nut still pours it onto metal tables to cool and breaks it by hand.
