Shuttle Mix Is Official Inaugural Snack : Morrow’s Pins Hopes on Savvy Publicity Schemes

Morrow’s Nut House has been blessed in recent years with a string of promotional schemes that even high-powered public relations firms only dream about.

Last year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Houston food selection division adopted one of the company’s mixtures of nuts and dried fruit as a dietary supplement for space shuttle astronauts. Soon after, Morrow’s changed the name of the product from Queensland Mix to Shuttle Mix and copyrighted the name.

For the Olympic Games in Los Angeles last summer, Morrow’s--which started 59 years ago as a “mom-and-pop” stand selling peanut brittle in Philadelphia and is now headquartered in San Dimas--held drawings to give away 1,000 tickets for events to customers at 35 Western-area stores.

Last August, during the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Morrow’s won approval to hand out $20,000 worth of Shuttle Mix to President Reagan, senior Cabinet members and 4,760 delegates.

Now, Shuttle Mix has been chosen to be the “official snack for the 50th American Presidential Inaugural.” At $8 a box, it will be “the least expensive gift in the Inaugural Catalogue,” said Howard B. Morrow Jr., 53, president of Betty Zane Corp., which owns Morrow’s, the nation’s largest family-owned franchise chain of nut and candy stores.

So why, wondered Morrow, who oversees operations of 41 company-owned and 230 franchise units nationwide--which had total revenue of about $41 million in 1984--haven’t more people heard of Morrow’s Nut House?

“I just don’t think we’ve caught on with the public yet,” Morrow said, munching on Shuttle Mix at the company’s Santa Anita Fashion Mall store. Maybe, he suggested, the potential of his promotional coups has been too large to get a grip on.

“It’s like trying to eat a watermelon without cutting it up,” he said, picking a whole macadamia nut out of a pile of Shuttle Mix on a table. “You can’t get a hold of it.”

Popping the pearly white ball into his mouth, Morrow chuckled: “If you know of a good public relations outfit, please let us know.”

He was only half kidding. “I always said, once I got enough medals and decorations on it (Shuttle Mix), I’d do some real advertising with it,” he said. Being chosen to be the official Inaugural snack, he added, is the “kudos we’ve been waiting for.”

In the best-case scenario, Morrow added, President Reagan would do for his blend of macadamia nuts, pecans, cashews, almonds and dried apricots, papayas, pineapple, mangoes and raisins what he did for jelly beans. The problem is in getting Reagan to say the words “I like Shuttle Mix” in public, he said.

Morrow’s main competitor, Aberdeen, N.J.-based Confectionery Square Corp., a publicly owned company that operates 122 Jo-Ann’s Nut Houses and 74 Chez Chocolat units nationwide, hasn’t been rattled by Morrow’s string of hits, or their potential.

“We’re not intimidated,” said Collin Gaffney, vice president-operations at Confectionery Square, which started manufacturing a chocolate space shuttle mold last year. He shrugged off the other company’s getting “involved with the astronauts and all that jazz down in Houston” as “little perks.”

After all, Gaffney said, the confections industry is “in its heyday right now,” with per-capita consumption reaching record levels across the nation, creating a windfall for many retailers in the business.

Patricia McGee, editor of Candy Industry magazine, a Cleveland-based trade publication, agreed. Per-capita consumption of confections, she said, went up from 16.7 pounds in 1982 to 17.7 pounds in 1983. Last year’s figures are unavailable, she said.

“The upward trend of interest in candy is reversing a longtime downward trend,” McGee said. The reasons for this include a growing demand for the “natural ingredients” that higher-priced candy and nuts and fruit contain. “Salt,” she added, “is the bad thing now.”

Gaffney added that, even if President Reagan, after nibbling on Morrow’s Shuttle Mix, proclaims his love for it, the benefits would be industrywide and not restricted to Morrow’s.

“When President Reagan openly broadcast that he loved jelly beans,” Gaffney recalled, “everybody went bonkers . . . (creating) this gourmet jelly bean phenomenon.”

For now, Morrow is just happy to have gotten the mixture in the general vicinity of the President’s mouth. For that, Morrow’s sister, Carol Morrow, 45, deserves the credit.

It was Carol Morrow, a member of the staunchly Republican organization Citizens for America, who wangled the deal to give away “special packages of Shuttle Mix for all these wheels--President Reagan and the rest” at the Republican National Convention, he said. And it was his sister, now working for the Inaugural committee, who managed to get the mix designated “official Inaugural snack.”

Edward Howard, president of New York-based HTC Commodity Corp. and a major supplier of nuts to Morrow’s, said that kind of aggressive, clever, well-timed marketing strategy has characterized the company since Howard B. Morrow Sr., 83, introduced Morrow’s Famous Butter Brittle in Philadelphia in 1926--marking the nation’s 150th birthday.

In 1928, the elder Morrow and his late wife, Caroline Elizabeth, opened the first Morrow’s Nut House on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J., where they sold mostly freshly roasted nuts. The Morrows reintroduced candy to the product line in the mid-1950s, most of which they made from old recipes developed by ancestor Betty Zane.

At the same time that the company is gearing up to bring its Shuttle Mix to the masses, it has embarked on a campaign to upgrade the appearance of its existing outlets.

“We’re moving away from orange colors and wood, which was the ‘70s look,” said Gordon Thompson, Morrow’s senior vice president-retail development and operations, “to green and white tones with rosewood and brass accents, which is the look of the ‘80s.”