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. The trademark record dates this one tightly, and it is the best piece of evidence on the whole stick. Planters LifeSavers Company registered “EVERYBODY LOVES A NUT” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, registration 1,754,080, and the filing claims first use — anywhere and in commerce — in September 1991. Registration issued in February 1993, and the mark was cancelled in 1999. Now look at the stem: the slogan carries a ™, not an ®. A company prints ™ while it is claiming a mark it has not yet registered, and switches to ® once registration issues. That puts this stick in the window between those two dates — roughly 1991 to 1993 — and it is why the Mr. Peanut figure beside it already carries a full ® while the slogan does not. The two marks on one piece of plastic are telling you two different stages of the same paperwork.

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

No place wore Mr. Peanut better than the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Planters opened a peanut shop there in 1930, and the same year a costumed Mr. Peanut began strolling the boards, silently advertising the five-cent bag of roasted peanuts. Local legend holds that the first shop had to close after rats got into the stock. The store came back at Virginia Avenue, across from Steel Pier, where old-timers remember the smell of roasting nuts pulling people in off the boards for decades.

That store closed in 1978, but Mr. Peanut never quite left: he kept turning up on the Boardwalk to pose for photographs, and one of his costumes is now displayed at the Atlantic City Historical Museum on Garden Pier. A swizzle stick like this one carried the same grin into the bars and kitchens of a later generation.

The store closed in 1978 and the Hard Rock stands on that ground now, but the trade did not stop there, and this is my favourite part of the whole story. The manager of that Planters store had a son, Leo Yeager III, and in 1972 he opened his own peanut shop at 10th Street and the Boardwalk in Ocean City, a few miles down the coast. It is still there. Planters let its licensees buy Mr. Peanut merchandise in quantity, and when he saw what collectors wanted he bought all he could get his hands on — a tractor-trailer full, something like 25,000 pieces, still going out at a thousand or two a year. That is the reason an unused plastic stirrer like this one is still here at all instead of sitting 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.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🍸 Bar cart: Stand it upright in a cordial glass or swizzle stick holder beside cocktail picks and an ice bucket.
• 🥜 Planters vignette: Group it with Planters tins, jars, pins or ads for a Mr. Peanut shelf.
• 🖼️ Shadow box: Mount it flat with an Atlantic City postcard or a Planters advertisement behind it.
• 🎡 Shore-town shelf: Pair it with boardwalk souvenirs for a Jersey Shore display.
• 🎁 Small gift: Present it in a little glass jar for the peanut lover or barware collector.

🎁 Who Collects These

Planters and Mr. Peanut collectors, one of the largest single-brand followings in advertising collecting; swizzle stick and barware collectors after figural shapes; Atlantic City and Jersey Shore collectors who remember the Boardwalk Mr. Peanut; and anyone who grew up with the Planters jar in the cupboard and the "Everybody Loves a Nut" commercials on television.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

How old is this swizzle stick?

No date is printed on it. The two marks on the plastic are the clock: the figure is registered, the slogan is not yet, and that gap is only a couple of years wide.

Who made it?

It carries Planters' own Mr. Peanut figure, with its ® mark, and the Planters slogan with its ™ mark. No manufacturer's name is printed on the stick.

What does New Old Stock mean here?

It means the stick was made for use or giveaway but never used: it comes from unused stock, with its black printing clean and its figure intact.

Is "Everybody Loves a Nut" a real Planters slogan?

Yes. Planters used it in its television advertising by 1988, and it is printed down the stem of this stick with a ™ mark.

Is Mr. Peanut still around?

Yes. Planters staged his "death" in January 2020 with a Super Bowl funeral and brought him straight back as Baby Nut. The character never left the brand.

Can I use it to stir a drink?

It was made to stir drinks, so it can. Most collectors keep an unused one for display.

And the habit started earlier than the company did. Obici learned it at the Musante family's fruit store in Wilkes-Barre, where the peanut roaster had a fan on it that pushed the smell out into the street to pull people in. He built his own roaster from scrapyard parts, then hid a letter of his surname in each bag so the lucky ones won a gold watch. On the Atlantic City Boardwalk the five-cent bag was sold as “The Nickel Lunch” while a costumed Mr. Peanut handed out samples. Give people the thing first — that was always the plan, and a swizzle stick is the same plan in plastic.