How to Sell Nuts for Extra Holiday Income

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By Gail Martin
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Medium sized black walnuts

If you have nut trees, here's how to make extra money selling the nuts at Christmas time.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

source of nuts
sifters
white pan
tweezers
tins and mugs
foil cupcake liners

Step 1

Our farmers market booth

Where to sell them:
We had great success making spiced black walnut nut meats which our family and friends praised. We then decided to go one step further. We sold them at the farmer's market. You could also sell them at a flea market or even online like on eBay.
Step 2

How to increase sales at holiday time:
Around the holidays, we fixed the special nuts in tins and mugs that we found at garage or estate sales. Look for ones appropriate for the season. Look for clean, rust-free, undented tins. People particularly like ones with holiday scenes on them, but other designs make nice gift tins too. Don't spend too much on these, or you will have to raise the price of the nuts.
We advertised in the local Shopper's Guide and people flocked in to buy these unique gifts.
Step 3

Strainer with large grid

Sort the nuts by size:
To get the biggest nut meats for the spiced nuts, my husband used different strainers with different size grids, large and medium. The large grid let everything go through except the largest pieces. Those large nuts worked great in the spiced nut recipe.
Step 4

Strainer with medium grid

Continue sifting using smaller and smaller grids:
Now he had lots of smaller sizes of nut meats. Really just bits and pieces. So he shook them up in a strainer with a smaller size grid. The smaller grid lets the tiny pieces of shell and other debris fall through. Then these can be run through a strainer with even a smaller grid for the best results.
Step 5

Make sure they're free of shells:
Clyde still dumps them into a white baking pan and searches for more shells that slipped through. Some tiny pieces of the shell stick to the nut meat and can be removed with tweezers. No one wants to bite into a piece of shell in their spiced nuts or Christmas baked goods.
The shaking in the strainers seem to bring out the oil in the nut meats, making them shiny and tastier. We loved the results of shell-free goodies. It brought return buyers who knew they could count on our product.
Step 6

Offer a variety of flavored and plain nuts:
With the medium size nut meats we made candied nut clusters. Click on the link to get my recipe for these. We also sold a lot of plain nuts for people who liked to bake. Some would get the smaller nuts for this, but many wanted premium nuts to use in their Christmas cookies.
The price of the plain nuts reflected the work we put into sorting and the demand for the holidays.
Step 7

We stored the spiced nuts and the different candied nuts in the large, empty ice cream buckets until we were ready to fill gift tins and mugs.
Step 8

When we filled the tins, we divided the different candied and spiced nuts using foil cupcake liners.
Step 9

For the mugs, line it with plastic wrap and fill with nuts. Pull the loose ends of the wrap up and twist it. Tie it at the twisted area with colorful Christmas ribbon. Use scissors to curl the ribbon.
Step 10

When someone responded to the Shopper's Guide advertisement, we set out a display of the different nuts in tins and cups on our dining room table. Try to make it festive and appealing.