Dashing through the snow in a front-wheel drive sleigh … the seasonal holiday road trip is a right of passage for many families. At one time, the roadside icon Stuckey’s was often a likely stop.
“At our peak, we had 368 stores in 40 states,” says Stephanie Stuckey, current chair of the Stuckey’s Corporation. “Stuckey’s really is synonymous with the road trip, during what I consider the era of the great American Road Trip, which would have been the 1950s to the 1970s.”
The roadside oasis, and its iconic pecan candies, are woven into the fabric of highway history.
“Back then, Americans wouldn’t travel by plane. They would load up in the car, usually in a family station wagon, and drive for five days,” Stuckey says.
The company was founded during the Great Depression by pecan farmer, WS Stuckey, as a roadside pecan stand.
“He always considered himself first and foremost, a pecan farmer and a pecan broker,” adds Stuckey, his granddaughter.
Today she’s leading a resurgence of that business, not as a highway stop, but as a pecan company with roots on Georgia farms.
“This is our big audacious goal: I want us to be the go-to pecan snack brand in the world,” she says.
Helping her on the journey is RG Lamar, a third-generation pecan farmer and company CEO.
“I can say as a Georgia pecan grower, I may be a little bit biased, I don’t know, but I genuinely believe we grow the best pecans in the world in the state of Georgia,” Lamar smiles.
He credits ample rainfall in the southeast and higher oil content with helping grow a larger-sized nut. The result is perfect for creating candied treats at Christmas.
Today, on an in-shell basis, Stuckey’s handles about 2 million pounds of Georgia pecans a year. As a state, Georgia grows roughly 100 million pounds.
“Interestingly, roughly 10% of the pecans grown in Georgia are grown in someone’s yard,” Larmar says.
Soon, the newly refocused Stuckey’s brand will be using even more Georgia pecans as the business continues to expand.
“Why is it that when you go into the grocery store, walk down the salty snack aisle and you get to the nuts, you can find every other nut sitting in that section, but you don’t see pecans there very often,” Lamar asks.
It’s a question this farmer and farmer’s granddaughter are aiming to answer.
“Of the original 368 stores there are only 12 left,” Stuckey says. “That’s OK because I saw what wasn’t on the balance sheets and that is the value of the brand.”
A brand, dumping, churning, dipping and packaging pecans, log rolls and clusters just the way the founder WS Stuckey did when he started.
“I would like to think if he were alive today, he would be really happy we’re making our comeback the way we began, as a pecan company,” Stuckey says.
Watch Christmas in the Country on Dec. 25 on AgDay TV.
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