Western Nut Company
“I didn’t grow up dreaming about nuts. But this is a business I am totally invested in.” Loren Mercer says it with the honesty and humor that seem to run through Western Nut Company as steadily as the scent of roasted nuts drifting from the back of the building. He is not trying to dress the story up. He did not inherit a childhood passion for cashews, almonds, or peanut brittle.
Loren grew up in Bountiful as one of seven children - six boys and one girl - in a family where hard work was expected. His father was a CPA who believed his children should earn their own way from an early age. Loren began working on a local farm when he was just seven years old, long before today’s child labor laws. For seven summers he planted, weeded, harvested, and learned that work came before leisure. Looking back, he laughs about it now. “People retire at sixty-five,” he joked. “I get to retire at fifty-eight because I started seven years too early.”
Apart from work, the Mercer family spent as much time outdoors as possible. Summers meant water skiing, and family vacations often centered around Lake Powell, Moab, St. George, and Southern Utah’s red rock country. That love of the outdoors has never faded. Today Loren is an avid canyoneer, exploring Utah’s narrow slot canyons with his brothers and sons, rappelling through landscapes he first fell in love with as a child.
Loren's father may have been determined to keep seven energetic children busy, but the lessons lasted far longer than the summers themselves. Responsibility, consistency, and showing up every day became second nature. Those values would later serve Loren well, first as a teacher for six years in St. George. Then Loren returned to northern Utah and spent the next six years working in his father’s accounting practice. Drawing on the mathematics background that had first led him into teaching, Loren prepared taxes during busy seasons and handled bookkeeping for clients. He gained the financial experience that would later prove invaluable, when, in 2007, Loren's father-in-law, Mike Place, asked him to come to Western Nut Company to help with the books.
Mike had owned the business since 1984, after purchasing it from the original owner. Western Nut itself began in 1966 and moved to its current downtown Salt Lake City location in 1988. A smaller retail shop grew over time into the store, warehouse, factory, shipping office, and production space that all remain connected under one roof.
For eleven years, Loren served as chief operating officer, learning the rhythm of the business from the inside. In 2018, when Mike and his partners were ready to sell, Loren and his brothers purchased Western Nut together. “I am not an entrepreneur,” Loren said. “I just took what worked and didn’t let it die.”
What worked was a company built around quality, freshness, and tradition. Western Nut is not trying to become Planters or Blue Diamond, Loren explained. “We like to be our niche, gourmet gifting place.” The company brings in nuts from where they grow best - almonds from California, peanuts and pecans from the southern states, hazelnuts from Oregon or Turkey depending on the harvest, cashews grown in Africa and processed overseas, and Brazil nuts from the Amazon region. Once the nuts arrive in Salt Lake, Western Nut does what it has always done: roasts, salts, flavors, mixes, and then packages with care.
The roasting is still done in an old-fashioned way, using oil rather than dry roasting. The result is a lighter roast and a gentler crunch, the kind longtime customers have come to expect. In the back, large roasters, metal tables, specially designed boxes that help draw out excess oil, copper kettles, and hand-bagging stations tell the story of a business that has modernized where it must but held tightly to what matters.
Freshness is one of those things. Loren explained that once nuts are roasted, the clock begins to move more quickly. Western Nut keeps a short shelf life on its roasted products and roasts according to need rather than letting inventory sit for long periods. “If ours taste the same as the cheap nuts, why would you spend the money?” he said. “We definitely taste them.” If something is not right, they pull it, replace it, and protect the name that customers have trusted for decades.
Sarah Adamson, Western Nut’s retail store manager, is the person Loren calls the “chief experience officer.” She came to the company in 2021, not because she knew nuts, but because Loren knew people - and he knew Sarah. Their families had been friends and neighbors for years. Sarah had a background in social work, and Loren believed her warmth, patience, and people skills were exactly what the store needed.
He was right. Sarah speaks about Western Nut as both a business and a feeling. She walked through the selling floor pointing out the rows of roasted nuts, party mixes, brittle, homemade fudge, and gift boxes. There are also local products tucked throughout the store, including Utah honey, local jams and jellies, Taffy Town taffy, old-fashioned candies, and gift items that make the shop feel less like a factory storefront and more like a place someone might stumble into and immediately slow down. “When people walk into Western Nut, we want them to take that deep breath and say, 'Oh, I’m in grandma’s house,' ” Sarah said, laughing. “In the nicest way possible.”
Christmas is the heart of the year. Western Nut may have about a dozen year-round employees during the slower months, but by the holiday season, that number can swell to nearly one hundred. The store is transformed with trees, decorations, gift boxes, baskets, and the kind of bustle that feels both exhausting and magical. Loren called it their Super Bowl. Sarah called it the season when Western Nut becomes part of people’s traditions.
Some customers come in because their grandparents had shopped here. Others ship boxes across the country. Companies send corporate gifts year after year. Western Nut makes that process easy, allowing businesses to send a list and let the team handle the wrapping, packing, and shipping. Tens of thousands of gift boxes leave the building each holiday season, along with thousands of baskets.
The same care extends to Paul’s Brittle, another piece of local history now housed within Western Nut. Paul’s began in 1961 and became known for its brittle. Western Nut had been one of its largest customers and it acquired Paul’s in 2004. The recipes, name, and tradition remain, and the brittle is still made in copper kettles, poured onto metal tables to cool, then broken by hand.
There is something almost old-world about Western Nut - the roasters, the kettles, the hand-bagging, the wrapped boxes, the people who answer the phone instead of sending customers through a menu. Loren is adamant about that. Sarah is equally adamant that the store itself matters. Many people have driven by for years, she said, not realizing what is inside. Others know Western Nut from holiday kiosks or mail-order gifts and are surprised to discover the downtown store.
“It is nuts,” Sarah said. “It shouldn’t add an emotion to it, but somehow it does.” That may be the best explanation of Western Nut Company. It is a place built on almonds, cashews, peanuts, pecans, brittle, fudge, baskets, boxes, and bows. But it is also a place built on memory, loyalty, and the rare pleasure of walking into a shop that still feels rooted in its own history. “We try to stay very loyal to our customers,” Sarah said, “because they have been extremely loyal to Western.”
