Hammons Products Co. is a family-owned business founded in 1946 by WWII veteran Ralph Hammons, the owner of a local grocery store in southwestern Missouri. His customers used local, native Black Walnuts for baking and cooking but lacked a reliable source of packaged, shelled nuts. For generations, families collected nuts from the abundant wild Black Walnut trees in the fall and had to crack the incredibly hard shells by hand. Hammons reasoned that his customers and people throughout the region …