Amedeo Obici founded a nationwide business and industrial empire on the peanut, making the origins of the Planters Peanut Company a narrative forever tied to one great immigrant’s destination and destiny, struggle and hope, passion and perseverance.
Before he was a teenager, his weary shipboard voyage across the Atlantic carried him to New York City. The fatherless boy had been sent to visit an uncle and after a two- or three-week ocean passage from Europe, he touched land in America. Unaccompanied, unknown, and ignorant of its alien language and way of life, he had a handwritten note fastened to his clothing, specifying where and to whom he was to go.
Finding His Way in America
Obici was born in Oderzo, Italy, on July 15, 1877. His father Pietro Lodovico Obici died when he was 7 years old. His mother, Luigia Carolina Sartor Obici had four children, and Amedeo was the eldest.At the age of 11, though unable to understand a word of English, he found himself on a steamer bound for America; Vittoria “Victor” Sartor, Amedeo’s maternal uncle, a tailor and later a police officer, waited for him in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Arriving in New York Harbor on March 17, 1889 after a long, jarring journey, Obici most likely heard the magical shouts of other Italians: “L‘America! L’America! Statua della Liberta!” Alone, he would have watched the passengers rush up to the deck, perhaps crowding to one side so they could get a clear look at the Statue of Liberty unveiled in 1886. Ellis Island, an ammunition depot, didn’t open as a point of entry for immigrants until Jan. 1, 1892.
Obici, with Victor’s address in Scranton pinned to his clothes, found the correct train route to Pennsylvania. However, he unintentionally exited the train in Wilkes-Barre, 20 miles southwest; seeing the boy lost and bewildered among the raucous hum and clang of the train cars, Enrico Musante, a local fruit store owner, came to his assistance. Enrico, accompanied by his daughter Louise, guided the boy in the right direction to Scranton.
American cities were expanding swiftly, and most Italian immigrants settled in urban areas close to places such as Scranton (population 75,215 in 1890), where unskilled labor was in high demand. Many of them found jobs in which speaking English was not required; their labor was cheap and grinding. They worked in construction: digging tunnels for subways, burying gas lines, laying cables or railroad tracks, or digging trenches, and working as stonemasons.
With virtually no money to his name, Obici “became a sweep and a shoeblack in a saloon,” a galvanizing experience that might have taught him that he needed to rely on more than just physical strength to attain better prospects.
Somewhere along the line, Obici ended up back in Wilkes-Barre, working in Musante’s fruit store. The courteous stranger was now his boss. Enrico roasted his own peanuts—and Obici was taken with the aromatic, earthy fragrance wafting from the machine. He was equally smitten with Louise, who would eventually become his wife.
Perhaps comprehending the fiscal and cultural plusses of assimilation, he enrolled in English classes in the evenings. Strange words and conversations began to make sense, and Obici, in his late teens, equipped with a greater sense of determination and confidence, bought an outdoor pushcart. Others hawked assorted fruits and vegetables. Obici sold peanuts.
The preexisting peanut preference of the period was the small Spanish-style nut covered with the papery red skin. Obici, however, discovered that folks might like them even more if they were separated from their shells, skinless and salted. He also learned that, no matter how taxing or daunting the times, people were willing to fork out a nickel for a bag of warmly roasted goodness. “I noticed that every one in this country always has a nickel,” Obici said.
By 1895, the coins amassed in his pocket allowed him to buy larger loads of peanuts, as well as a better roaster, and he acquired a horse and wagon to spread out his delivery area in Pennsylvania.
The Formation of Planters and Mr. Peanut
In 1906, Obici and Peruzzi organized the Planters Peanut Company in Wilkes-Barre, with Obici serving as president and Peruzzi as secretary and head sales manager. Obici and Peruzzi set out to find a reliable market for their peanuts, and, to get their product in people’s hands and mouths, the two men canvassed door-to-door delivering samples.Profits, at first, were minimal, and with the business on the brink of failure, the partners revised their model and reorganized as the Planters Nut and Chocolate Company, in 1908.
As Obici’s relied on Virginia peanuts, he decided to cut out the middlemen and reduce transportation costs and so moved production into Virginia, where he purchased his own buildings and farmlands.
The operation started in 1913 in Suffolk, Virginia, just three years after it became incorporated as a city. The original factory comprised of equipment and staff catalogued as: “2 mules, horse, 1 building, 5 girls and 1 man.”
The peanut specialist was always looking for newer, more efficient methods. The blanching, packaging, and transporting peanuts, and the manufacturing equipment that he employed at the time would have been considered cutting-edge ingenuities: an automatic shelling apparatus; an electric eye sorting machine; a tube that suctioned each individual nut off the conveyor belt; and a piece of equipment that formed, packed, and closed cellophane bags full of peanuts in a continuous cycle.
Obici understood the importance of not just meeting public demand but creating it with the use of alluring designs and innovative marketing, such as clear, visible packaging and mascot recognition.
The peanut vendor who came to America without a dollar to his name eventually eventually became a millionaire, prompting one publication to dub Obici the “world’s peanut king.”
When asked about the success of the company—the increasing number of plants and factories built, acres purchased, products offered, and sales made—Obici explained it as a simple mixture of good breaks and smart resolve. “I saw an opportunity and grasped it,” Obici said.
In 1916, Mr. Peanut, also known as Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe, made its first appearance after a 14-year-old Suffolk boy Antonio Gentile won a contest for his drawing of an anthropomorphized nut. Later, Obici commissioned an artist to add Mr. Peanut’s dandy top hat, cane, monocle, and gloves.
Planters grew in both stature and sales after the company launched a national advertising campaign with hard-to-miss ads in the popular Saturday Evening Post and other magazines and newspapers. Indeed, an article in Fortune magazine in 1938 called Planters “the biggest peanut confectioner in the world” and placed the previous year’s sales of all products at “$6,600,000 worth of business.” “It isn’t likely that you’ve missed hearing something about Planters,” wrote Fortune.
By the time that Fortune extolled the success of Planters, millions of Italians had passed through Ellis Island. Italians settled throughout the United States in a multiplicity of occupations, from onion farming in Canastota, New York and mining in Colorado, to construction in Seattle and sardine fishing in the waters around San Francisco. They were as far-flung as sugarcane workers in Louisiana and cowpokes and sharecroppers in Texas. Now one of these newcomers was an agricultural titan, growing his crop in fertile farmlands about 150 miles southeast of Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson once also grew peanuts.
“My success, like every other man’s, is due to luck,” once said Obici. “But then you must have what the people want or they won’t buy it.”
Obici was president of the corporation when he died May 22, 1947. Overseeing, according to his obituary, a $10 million business at the time, he had come a long way from earning of a few dollars here and there on a pushcart peddler’s earnings.
His death sparked a large outpouring of warm eulogies from his many friends, including former Chief Justice of the United States Fred Moore Vinson (1890–1953), who had this to say about him: “His life’s story and accomplishments will be ever classed among the greatest in American industrial history.”
The splendid former estate of Obici, bordering the Nansemond River, is owned by the city of Suffolk. Part of the Obici fortune was used to build a hospital there in 1951, and portions of the endowment funded the construction of a hospital in Amedeo’s ancestral homeland in Oderzo, Italy.
