A high official of the city of New York wrote: “Such pecans never were seen before in our neighborhood. They are all you advertised them to be. I sent a box on to my daughter in Boston.”

From another, whose husband is at the head of a publication which enjoys national prestige as an exponent of the finest nuts and other foods by mail order, we received the following letter, along with the second order: “Enclosed find check for which send package of your Hess Pecans. Kindly ship these at once as we wish them for Thanksgiving.”

Why take more of your time with detailed copies of letters from customers ordering and re-ordering Hess Brand Paper Shell Pecans? Is not the fact that re-orders were received in itself the best evidence of superior quality when it is considered that the selling price of many of these shipments was $1.25 for 12 ounces, or at the rate of $1.65 per pound?

The man whose wife wrote the last letter questioned whether any one would pay this price—for an addition of fifty per cent. of the price of the average paper shell pecan was too much, in his opinion. He questioned the price before he sampled the nuts and noticed how much they were preferred in his own home and among his friends. After that the price was forgotten and the recollection of superior quality led him to re-order, just as it did many others.

For the past several years we have had to confine our sales almost entirely to mail orders, because the supply has failed to increase quickly enough to meet the demand. But in 1914 we made a test in one American city of only 51,000 population (based on the 1910 census) through one wholesale grocery firm. Paper shell pecans had not been previously known in this section, their salesmen said that it was absurd to attempt to market a 12–oz. box of Hess Brand Pecans at the retail price of $1.00, then prevailing. Yet grocers re-ordered and re-ordered till our available supply was exhausted—the demand created by the nuts themselves astonished all concerned.

The city in which this test was made was not our home town. It does not stand above the average in per capita wealth—nor is there any evidence to show that the people of this city are more likely to be interested in pecans than any average American. To make such a test in a large city like New York was impossible—for the entire yield of a 100,000–acre plantation, planted twenty trees to the acre, could not supply a week’s demand there, if New York bought pecans in the same proportion as the city cited above.

A leading agricultural publication says:

“Tyler is a Texas town with about 12,000 people who eat a carload of pecans every year. If New York ate pecans at the same rate, it would consume our whole crop.” (“Whole crop” refers to all of America’s crops combined, which is also the world’s crop.)