MARIANI, DENNIS-JACK-MARTY

Walnut Processor

In the early 1900s, immigrants from Croatia and the Adriatic islands in Dalmatia had followed their older brothers to the Santa Clara Valley, where they bought and farmed fruit and nut orchards. Their children were farming those orchards in the 1950s and 1960s when houses started to fill the area. Like other Santa Clara farmers, as they sold orchards to developers, they often brought new orchards farther away and set up processing facilities. That’s why you’ll find the 25-year-old Mariani Nut Company, the largest independent nut processor in the world, right in the Bay Area’s backyard, in Winters, in Yolo County. Owned and managed now by the third generation of Marianis- Dennis, Jack and Marty- the company ships millions of pounds of nuts worldwide for over 1,000 California farmers. At one time, says Jack Mariani, part of the walnut crop was held- unsold- to maintain market price. About a third of California’s walnut crop is handled “old fashioned,” in-shell, for shipment in October and November. Much of it goes by ship to Northern Europe, where it’s sold during the year-end holidays. The other two-thirds of the crop is shelled, then packaged and sold as walnut meats throughout the year. The biggest market for these shelled nuts is here in the United States. In the first half of the century, Southern California and the Stockton area were the state’s major walnut production centers. Walnut orchards were abundant here, too, on the deeper soils in the valleys of the Bay Area and its outlying counties until swept away by the housing boom of the 1950s and ‘60s. In Contra Costa County, walnuts were planted around Clayton and Brentwood, in the Moraga Valley, in the small valleys around Lafayette, in the Diablo Valley, around Walnut Creek and Concord. The Santa Clara Valley had early plantings of walnuts, with orchards trailing down through Morgan Hill to Hollister. Walnuts have moved north now, out of Southern California and almost out of the Bay Area, forced out by housing development. Visalia is the significant southern producing area. The orchards skip up to Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, then follow the Sacramento and Feather Rivers up to Chico and Red Bluff.