Vintage 1990s Mr. Peanut Swizzle Stick 🥜 NOS Planters "Everybody Loves a Nut" White Plastic Barware

Remember the Mr. Peanut Swizzle Stick? The Peanut Who Outlived His Own Funeral 🥜

Size: 6" x 1"

In January 2020, Planters did something no brand had ever done to a mascot that old: it killed him off. Mr. Peanut, 104 years in the top hat, "died" in an advertising stunt, got a televised funeral during the Super Bowl, and came back as Baby Nut. The internet mourned a peanut. That tells you how deep this little gentleman runs in American memory.

This swizzle stick comes from his long middle career, when he stood at the rim of a highball glass telling everyone in the room, in black capital letters, EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT.

🥜 What It Is

This is a New Old Stock Mr. Peanut swizzle stick in molded white plastic, 6 inches long. The top is the full figure of Mr. Peanut, printed in black: top hat with "MR PEANUT" on the band, monocle, a wide grin, one hand on his hip and the other on his cane, legs crossed at the ankle, with a registered ® mark at his feet. Down the stem, in bold black capitals, runs "EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT.™", and the stick ends in a small round ball tip for stirring. The back is plain white, the figure's silhouette with no printing.

No date and no maker's name are printed on it. The slogan is what dates it.

📅 Dating It by the Slogan

The slogan is the clock: first use claimed September 1991, registered February 1993, and the stem still prints ™ rather than ® — so the stick belongs in between. Here's how that works. The paperwork is at the Patent and Trademark Office: Planters LifeSavers Company filed EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT as registration No. 1,754,080, swearing it first used the line, anywhere and in commerce, in September 1991. The registration came through in February 1993 and was cancelled in 1999. A company puts ™ on a mark it claims but hasn't registered yet, and changes to ® when the certificate arrives. So a stick with ™ on the slogan was made in that gap, roughly 1991 to 1993 - and that's exactly why the little Mr. Peanut standing above it, registered for decades, already wears a full ®. One piece of plastic, two marks, two different stages of the same paperwork. It's the best clue on the whole stick.

By then Planters was no longer the independent Planters Nut and Chocolate Company. Standard Brands took that company over in 1960, and in 1981 Standard Brands merged with Nabisco, so a stick from this campaign was made for the Planters brand under Nabisco ownership. The brand later passed to Kraft in 2000 and, in 2021, to Hormel Foods, which bought Planters for $3.35 billion.

🎩 A Pushcart, a Schoolboy and a Monocle

The company behind the figure was founded in 1906 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, by Italian immigrants Amedeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi, and it grew from a peanut-roasting business into a national brand. Wilkes-Barre sits in the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania, right in the middle of hard-coal country, and all that anthracite earned it the nickname the Diamond City. I have always liked that a peanut company got its start in a coal town. Much of its processing later moved to Suffolk, Virginia, the heart of peanut country, down in the Hampton Roads region.

Mr. Peanut was born in 1916, when Planters held a contest for a trademark and a fourteen-year-old Suffolk schoolboy named Antonio Gentile won with a sketch of a smiling peanut with arms and legs. The prize is usually given as five dollars. A commercial artist then dressed the character up with the monocle, the top hat and the cane, turning a cartoon peanut into a dandy. Most accounts give that makeover to Andrew S. Wallach, a Chicago commercial artist. Wilkes-Barre artist Frank P. Krize Sr. has been credited with it too, but Wallach's daughter Virginia has maintained that Krize joined the project after Mr. Peanut was already created. The joke was the whole point: a nickel snack dressed like old money. It became one of the longest-running character trademarks in American advertising.

🎡 Boardwalk Legend: Mr. Peanut in Atlantic City

Nowhere did Mr. Peanut look more at home than on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Planters opened a shop there in 1930, and that same year a man in the Mr. Peanut costume started walking the boards without a word, selling the five-cent bag just by being there. Local legend holds that the first shop had to close after rats got into the stock. It reopened at Virginia Avenue, across from Steel Pier, where old-timers remember the smell of roasting nuts pulling people in off the boards for decades.

The Virginia Avenue store shut its doors in 1978, and still Mr. Peanut never really left - he kept showing up on the Boardwalk for photographs, and one of his costumes hangs today in the Atlantic City Historical Museum on Garden Pier. A swizzle stick like this one took that same grin into the bars and kitchens of the next generation.

The Hard Rock sits on that spot now - but here's my favorite part. The store manager's son, Leo Yeager III, opened a peanut shop of his own in 1972 at 10th Street and the Boardwalk in Ocean City, a few miles down the shore, and it's still open. Planters let licensees buy Mr. Peanut merchandise by the case, and once he saw what collectors were after, he bought everything he could - a tractor-trailer load, around 25,000 pieces, and they still sell a thousand or two a year. That's why an unused plastic stirrer like this one survived at all instead of ending up in a landfill with a drink ring on it: Jersey Shore peanut-shop stock, bought deep and kept dry.

🍸 The Swizzle Stick as Advertising

Swizzle sticks put a brand in the customer's hand at the exact moment of leisure, which is why hotels, restaurants, airlines, cruise lines and food and drink brands all had their own. The hobby of collecting them even has a name, rhabdophily. Figural sticks shaped like a character, rather than a plain stick with a logo, are the ones collectors single out, and a Mr. Peanut stick crosses over into the much larger world of Planters collecting, where tins, jars, banks and pins have been hunted for decades.

🥜 Give people the thing first

Giving the customer a taste first was in the company's blood before there was a company. Young Obici picked it up at the Musante family's fruit store in Wilkes-Barre, where a fan on the peanut roaster blew the smell out onto the sidewalk to reel people in. He built his own roaster out of junkyard parts and hid one letter of his last name in each bag, and the lucky ones won a gold watch. Out on the Atlantic City Boardwalk the five-cent bag went by The Nickel Lunch while the costumed Mr. Peanut passed out samples. A swizzle stick is the same idea in plastic.

🥜 About these

They're 6 inches long, unused, the black printing clean. Stand one in a cordial glass on the bar cart, put it on a Mr. Peanut shelf with the tins and jars, or mount it in a shadow box over an old Atlantic City postcard. It still stirs a drink if you want it to. The supply is finite - nobody's making this Everybody Loves a Nut stick again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.