The new Walnut Alliance of California is hitting the ground running in Sacramento, tackling transparency among growers while conducting outreach to build up its membership base.
Conceptually similar to the Almond Alliance of California, the new nonprofit organization will fill in political activities that the California Walnut Commission and Walnut Board of California cannot conduct themselves under their federal and state marketing orders. One of its first acts: creating a political action committee to raise funding for its affiliate organizations.
The alliance is absorbing members from the Walnut Bargaining Association, which will continue to exist “in the event the cooperative structure of the WBA is ever needed in the future,” according to a document the Walnut Alliance shared with Agri-Pulse. WBA’s original purpose was to establish negotiating prices between growers with handlers, according to Walnut Alliance board member and fourth-generation farmer John Heier.
He said the alliance emerged from the lack of negotiating power at WBA, which struggled to keep up as the number of walnut handlers in California steadily grew.
“To try to manage that and negotiate with over 75 handlers is next to impossible, so we felt that the next best thing would be to bring transparency to the growers or to the industry,” Heier said, explaining that every handler varies on standards, incentives and deductions.
The Walnut Alliance's immediate board of directors is made up of WBA's original leadership, though the alliance is looking for additional walnut professionals to join. Chris Zanobini, president and CEO of Ag Association Management Services Inc., was previously contracted by WBA and is now helping organize the alliance.
While Zanobini said its too early to confirm what policy interests the alliance will take, he eventually hopes to bring on advocates to achieve legislative goals.
Walnut farmers went through some tough times over the last couple of years. The 2023 Grower Price Report found that growers across the state were paid remarkably low prices, on top of an unexpected surplus in 2022; walnuts are more perishable compared with their tree nut counterparts, making high inventories undesirable at the start of the year. A December 2024 report from Terrain analyst Matt Woolf found that walnut prices dropped to their lowest cost since 1987, while production costs rose at the same time. From September 2023 to August 2024, California walnut growers had roughly 18,000 walnut bearing acres removed.
In a news release announcing the alliance’s launch, Yuba City-based walnut grower Pete Jelavich remarked that “virtually all of the prices reported” in the survey “were below break-even for growers" regardless of their handler, an estimated 75 to 80 cents per in-shell pound.
Heier hopes the alliance can quickly gain trust with growers and their handlers. A walnut grower himself, he decided to join the board after consistent frustration over the prices he received for his crop compared with the dollar amount they went for on the shelf.
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“It seems like the almond industry is more aligned,” he said. “Their marketing and their branding — their advertising in general — just seems to be ahead of where walnuts are at, and I think [we're] going to get there.”
Woolf identified unique challenges the walnut industry is facing, beyond those typical of domestic tree nuts: slow domestic demand growth, increased foreign competition in China and Chile, and having a singular dominant variety.
He attributed the lack of domestic growth primarily due to walnuts being purchased as a baking ingredient – and before COVID-19, baking ingredient sales were declining. He also found that U.S. walnut consumption is lower than in countries of comparable income and food preferences.
"Almonds, pistachios have experienced pretty strong demand growth throughout the last few decades, and walnuts really haven't," Woolf told Agri-Pulse. "I also think that just culturally, there's a lot of barriers to increasing that – I think increasing consumption is probably the hardest thing you can do in an ag market."
He also projected that prices would continue to – as they did all of 2024 – or level out in the new year due to reductions in walnut carry-in and a smaller crop yield in both Chile and California.
On Tuesday Woolf told Agri-Pulse that walnuts appear to be stabling out at their current levels, describing the price gains as "pretty incredible." He said growers are likely leaving the worst behind them in 2022, adding that forming an alliance makes sense for the industry overall.
Heier is hopeful that more members means more access to information in different parts of the industry, which in turn the alliance would package and distribute to members.
He noted that the Walnut Alliance invites growers, handlers, hullers and other walnut industry-adjacent businesses to join, which he sees as an advantage to create conversation across the supply chain.
That could include new pricing, market, technology or acreage reports, Heier said. The alliance is still finalizing by-laws and a board structure but has a membership portal open with tiered options based on acreage or processing capacity.
He foresees a focus on incentives for quality nuts and figuring out how much brokers and handlers are willing to pay for a higher quality product, but remains confident the California Chandler variety can and will compete well in the global marketplace. The alliance will also begin pushing an email newsletter – members only – with industry updates.
“We have to go through the process and work to better market and expose our walnuts to all the markets,” Heier said.
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