The Grundmann family are nuts for pecans

Walking into Valley View Pecan Company, the smell of fresh-cracked pecans and homemade candies evoke a scrumdiddlyumptious thought of what it would be like to enter Willy Wonka’s candy factory. However, this facility is located near Shawnee, Oklahoma, and there are no Oompa Loompas keeping the daily operations moving—only the Grundmann family and a few select helpers.

In 1973, John Grundmann, the family patriarch, started a business cracking and shelling pecans for other people. The pecan processing he was able to perform back then only removed about 75 to 80 percent of the shell. Janice Grundmann, John’s wife, started a retail store in 1981 and sold large quantities of native pecan meats.

“Jobs were scarce when I got out of college,” John said. “I had a business degree and nobody was looking to hire. An uncle of mine had just bought machinery to crack and shell pecans. I started helping him and before long I decided to buy the place and I’ve been doing this ever since.”

Up until the 1990s, the Grundmanns were able to buy their pecan meats from a business in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. After it closed, they began buying from out-of-state pecan growers. They soon realized it was difficult to find fresh pecans from so far away. Eventually, John and Janice decided to join the store and the shelling facility to process pecans for their store and other pecan growers.

John says at one time, there were five pecan-shelling facilities in Oklahoma, but now only Valley View and one other two-year-old business in Afton, Oklahoma, exist.

“We kind of jumped off the deep end in 2001 and built our own shelling place,” John said.

The present day facility was built with the help of John’s son, Josh, a biosystems and ag engineering as well as food science graduate of Oklahoma State University. He has used his education to return to the family business and help Valley View Pecan Company develop more efficient processing systems.

Pecans: A complicated nut

John says there are around 300 varieties of pecans. Most can be sorted into two categories: Improved, or papershell, pecans, which are quite large, and native pecans, which are on the smaller side. On average, the harvested pecan meat from papershell pecans runs from 50 to 62 percent. A native pecan runs anywhere from 30 to 42 percent.

“Last year I think we shelled about 65,000 pounds for our store,” John said “It was probably about 35,000 pounds of natives and 30,000 pounds of the papershells. We’re set up to shell 500,000 pounds a year. Last year wasn’t a very good year, but I think we shelled 175,000 pounds. In past years, we have shelled as much as 250,000 to 300,000 pounds of pecans.”

Most of the pecans grown in Oklahoma are native. In fact, Oklahoma ranked No. 1 in native pecan production with 11,000,000 pounds of natives in 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Oklahoma is fifth in overall production of papershell and natives. John says Pawnee is the native pecan of choice at Valley View and the Grundmanns usually buy 30,000 to 35,000 pounds of them to shell each year.

“A lot of people really like the natives because they say their pies taste better,” John said. “When I was growing up, the papershells always tasted dry because the trees didn’t have enough moisture to fill the larger shells. Now they’re grown on drip irrigation and if I blindfolded you and fed you a piece of both you wouldn’t know the difference.”

The Grundmanns have 780 pecan trees of their own, but are so busy cracking and shelling pecans for their store and other customers that they do not have time to get out and harvest their own. Josh estimates half of the pecans they crack are bought from pecan growers for their store and half are for outside customers.

It is not always easy to make nuts when growing pecans. Some threats include mites, mold, necrosis and wild hogs. However, this year the Easter freeze was the biggest enemy to the pecan crop.

“In all the years that I’ve been doing this, it’s usually an early freeze or a late freeze that hurts them,” John explained. “There have been years when we’ve had bumper crops and it would freeze two weeks before harvest and they’d never open.”

Water has also been an issue this year. The pecans will not drop from their hulls when there is too much moisture. John says in some cases this is a blessing because if they did drop into 2 inches of standing water they would be ruined anyway.

Processing a pecan

Pecans are put through a long process at Valley View before they end up in a cookie or chocolate turtle. The Grundmanns designed a lot of the current pecan processing equipment. John credits Josh’s engineering mind with coming up with ways to make it easier to remove the shells and take more of the heavy lifting out of the processing.

First, whole pecans are brought to Valley View in giant bags that can hold 1,800 to 2,000 pounds of nuts. Next, the pecans are put into a metal basket that can hold as much as 500 pounds of nuts, then suspended into water heated to at least 180 degrees Fahrenheit to sterilize the shells from bacteria such as E. coli. Once sterilized, they are dried and cooled and moved on to the cracking machine.

“This machine is kind of like a Gatlin gun for nut cracking,” Josh explained. “It can crack 500 to 1000 nuts per minute depending on their size and usually around 500 pounds per hour.”

Next, the cracked nuts and shells are carried on a conveyor belt to the sheller, which Josh compares to the inside of a combine. Just like it sounds, the sheller’s job is to remove the outer shell from the pecan, which does not always want to separate. The nuts make their way to the shaker next, where the nuts dance away from their shell counterparts. As each shell is removed, the equipment sends it to barrels separate from the pecan meat barrel. All the shells are mulched and stored in containers where they will be sold in the springtime for mulch specifically for roses and azaleas because of their high acid content.

Just like any grain, moisture content is important for pecan harvesting.

“If we run a batch of pecans through with a high moisture content, they’ll just turn to a moldy mess,” Josh said. “We look for them to be four percent moisture and if they’re too high we set them in a drying box to take some of the water out.”

To make doubly sure a shell does not end up in a package of pecans, workers sort through every batch by hand before boxing them by the pound.

Pecan passion

Janice handles the mail orders of pecans and ships to all 50 states. The holiday season keeps her extremely busy. Some of the pecans sold in the store are also made into candy such as pecan brittle or cinnamon sugar pecans. She says people call all the time and have pecans shipped to loved ones as gifts.

However, just because a pecan was shelled and packaged by the Grundmanns, does not mean it will have the Valley View label on the sack. No Valley View labeled sacks are sold to other stores because the Grundmanns do not want their good name on nuts sold outside of their quality control. If a grocery store fails to take out-of-date pecans off the shelf, that mistake could reflect on the Grundmanns. The only way to get a sack with the Valley View label is to purchase it through the store.

“We guarantee what we sell and everything we sell has a date on it,” John said.

John says pecans have been his passion and hobby.

“I haven’t gotten sick of pecan pies yet,” he said. “Every time you start cracking pecans you have to test one from each batch by pulling the shell off the meat to make sure it’s right. Well, I always think if you’ve got it in your hand you can’t throw it back in the barrel so I eat that one and we’d run 80 batches a day so I was eating about 80 pecans a day and I’m not over them yet.”

After 45 years of cracking pecans it is probably safe to say John and his family will be nuts about pecans for a long time to come.

Lacey Vilhauer can be reached at 620-227-1871 or [email protected].