Big hazelnut crop puts sweet glaze on business

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Rob Hilles looked at boxes stacked on a pallet at Hazelnut Hill, checking out the shipping labels.

“This is going to Minnesota. This is going to Oklahoma. Florida. This is going to Florida,” he said, lifting up a box.

Though the hazelnut harvest is usually around Oct. 1, Christmas is the busiest season at Hazelnut Hill, a farm and store off the highway between Corvallis and Monroe.

With people across the nation ordering such gifts as chocolate-covered hazelnuts and dried blackberries, things can get a little, well, nuts.

Business owner Hilles said he’s been averaging about 16-hour days, and that he’s been on the job 120 days straight. He added that to keep up with orders, his wife, Sally, has pulled some 24-hour shifts.

Hazelnut Hill usually does about 70 percent of its business during the holidays, but things have been even crazier thanks to a large crop this year, Hilles said.

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the hazelnut crop was forecast to be up 49 percent.

“The quality of the crop was better than it’s been in four or five years,” Hilles said. The increase in the crop has made the price drop from $4.50 per pound to $3.50 per pound.

The price last year was high because the world supply was low, said Polly Owen, manager of the Hazelnut Marketing Board of Oregon. This year could be the biggest world crop ever, she said.

Hazelnut Hill differs from many traditional farms in Oregon, which export most of their nuts in the shell to foreign markets.

The local business is known for being on the cutting edge of value-added domestic marketing, using hazelnuts as ingredients in sweets, bakery products and snack mixes, and for a “really, really quality product,” Owen said.

Jack Grimes of Springfield agreed.

“It’s good. It’s quality. It’s fresh,” the 76-year-old said, after buying gift packages to send to Texas and California at the Hazelnut Hill retail shop.

Hilles started growing nuts in 1984, and the company formerly was at Fern Ridge in Lane County.

The business started selling chocolate-covered nuts 15 years ago and opened its initial retail shop in 1995.

Hazelnut Hill moved to Benton County about seven years ago, to a larger farm that’s been in Sally Hilles’ family since it was homesteaded in 1853.

The Hilles’ trees are only six years old, so Hazelnut Hill buys many of its nuts from other growers.

“It will be very little time before we’re growing all of our own again,” Rob Hilles said.

The company logo is a wood duck. “Wood ducks love hazelnuts. We have them all around here,” Hilles said.

But that is not a problem on the 225-acre farm.

“We have 35,000 trees. It would take a lot of wood ducks to make a dent,” Hilles said.