Virginia & Spanish Peanut Company.
Company: Virginia & Spanish Peanut Co.
Type of business: manufacturer/ importer/distributor of specialty nuts, concession and confectionery supplies
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Owner: family-owned corporation
Year founded: 1913
Number of employees: 8
Annual revenue: WND
Location: Providence
Peter S. Kaloostian was a young Armenian immigrant living in Providence, determined to make a go of it in the new country, when he got a bit of prophetic business advice sometime before 1913, according to family lore. An ambitious young man with a head on his shoulders and just enough sand under his soles could create his own American dream in either of two industries that would boom in the new 20th century, an older gentleman advised Kaloostian: automobiles, or peanuts.
“A friend of his recommended the nut business. He thought it would be a good enterprise because nuts would become very popular,” said Peter Kaloostian, the retired president of Providence-based Virginia & Spanish Peanut Co., and the namesake of the grandfather who founded the company. “If only he had gone into the auto business, I’d be driving a beautiful new car right now. I keep on visualizing I’d be driving a Mercedes, but I don’t know. He might have gone into a Chevy dealership.”
But in 1913, Kaloostian chose peanuts over Chevrolets, naming his business after the two varieties of peanuts – Virginia peanuts and Spanish peanuts – that he planned to import, roast, press into butter and sell to a nutty American populace. Two years after founding the company in an Olneyville apartment, in 1915 Kaloostian moved his Virginia & Spanish Peanut Co. into a defunct glass bottle cap factory on Dexter Street in South Providence.
In the decades that followed, peanuts didn’t pan out quite like the Model T. But Kaloostian stuck with the woody legumes until the end, eventually handing a modest, solid enterprise over to his sons, Leon and Tony. Some years later, Leon bought Tony’s share of the business, and in 1988 Leon passed the family’s peanut business on to his sons, Peter and Bob.
Today, the Virginia & Spanish Peanut Co. still operates out of the century-old factory on Dexter Street. Peter was president of the company for more than a decade before handing the title over to his brother Bob, the current president. Peter’s daughter, Candace, is the company’s vice president.
In their generation, Peter and Bob have expanded the business into a diverse operation. Despite the 90-year-old name, the Virginia & Spanish Peanut Co. deals in more than peanuts now. It makes specialty nuts and nut butters, imports many kinds of nuts harvested from groves around the world, and distributes nuts, dried fruits, confectionery products and concession supplies to carnivals, bakeries, ice cream shops and candy stores throughout New England.
The business plan may be modern, but the operation inside the labyrinthine factory on Dexter Street has an Old World feel. On a recent afternoon, the air was filled with a rich aroma in a sun-dappled room on the top floor of the brick building, as cashew pieces roasted in a vat of black, bubbling oil. Nearby, fully roasted nuts were suspended in a stainless steel mesh cage, draining and cooling next to a chute that disappeared into the floor.
One floor below, peanut roasters that were installed in the 1920s rattled a deafening clackety-clack as conveyor belts turned hundreds of roasting nuts inside the drums. The worn, wide floorboards were burnished a deep black, basted by almost a century’s worth of fragrant peanut oil.
Virginia peanuts, the bigger of the two varieties the company is named after, the Kaloosians import from Virginia and North Carolina. They import their Spanish peanuts – a smaller, rounder variety with a cellophane-like skin – from Texas, not Spain.
On every floor, the factory seemingly bursts with the myriad products it sells – aisle upon aisle of neatly stacked cardboard boxes with simple white labels that announce “chocolate covered pretzels,” “popcorn kernels,” “dehydrated pineapple rings,” “malt balls,” “jimmies,” “yogurt covered raisins,” “Sno Kones,” “nonpareils,” “macaroon paste.”
Down in the dimly lit basement, refrigerated air blows from humming machines onto pallets stacked straight through the room. The massive sacks contain almonds and walnuts from California, pecans from Georgia, shelled and blanched filberts from Oregon, filberts in the shell from Turkey, cashews and pistachios and Brazilian nuts from brokers in Brazil and India and Africa.
“We’re everybody’s company because we’re so diversified. We’re the only company that can offer one-stop shopping for specialty nuts, all-natural homemade peanut butter, concession supplies and confectionery supplies. We’re in a bunch of different niches,” said Bob Kaloostian.
Bob, his brother Peter and Peter’s daughter Candace talk about the earlier years of the family business, when importing and selling nuts from around the world really was big business. In the middle of the 20th century, the business supplied Rhode Island’s powerful patricians and rich blue bloods with the exotic snacks they desired.
“I remember the days when Mrs. Haffenreffer,” (whose wealthy family founded Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology) “would pull up in her limousine and walk up to this door with a guy holding a parasol over her head, so that she could buy a one pound bag of walnuts,” said Peter.
“One time a car pulls up and Governor Licht steps out. He said, ‘We’re entertaining at the governor’s house and we need nuts.’ Mrs. Licht still comes here,” said Candace.
“Why we’ve been in business so long – loyal customers,” said Peter Kaloostian.
“Being in business 90 years, you have to have that. People trust what we do.”
