From left, David Wolfe and Courtney Carini are cofounders of Crazy Go Nuts, which was invited to be a vendor at the Coachella music festival. Crazy Go Nuts photo

What do Billy Crystal, a flash-animated web-based comedy series and an Italian great grandfather all have in common?

One phrase: Crazy Go Nuts.

Co-Founded by Courtney Carini and her boyfriend at the time David Wolfe, Crazy Go Nuts offers uniquely flavored walnut snacks, merchandise and a unique walnut butter, crafted from the motivation of Carini’s mother’s original orange walnut recipe.

Crazy Go Nuts initially started when Carini’s father offered her walnuts — 1,200 pounds of walnuts — from the trees on his property. Carini decided to earn some extra holiday money while working as a television stand-in and comedy writer in Los Angeles by experimenting with different walnut recipes.

After the initial success of the orange flavored walnuts, Carini decided to continue producing the nuts for sale at local farmers’ markets.

“I came up with a whole line of all these different flavors of coated walnut snacks,” she said.

After initially finding success in the local farmers’ market scene, Crazy Go Nuts were invited to be vendors at Coachella and other music festivals.

From there, business picked up dramatically, forcing Carini to seek out potential walnut producers.

“It got to be too much for two people to handle,” Carini said. “We ended up having a mini-shark tank session eventually and it was between two different ones [nut producers] and we went with Poindexter Nut Company.”

Poindexter Nut Company is based in Selma.

Carini was able to secure a deal with East Coast-based grocery store Kroger, which introduced Crazy Go Nuts to California grocers Ralphs and Fred Meyer stores, both of which are subsidiaries of Kroger operating in Northern and Southern California.

Fortunately for Crazy Go Nuts, being a pre-packaged product made things much easier to continue to turn a profit during the pandemic.

Carini said that with many producers suffering supply chain issues, having her product on store shelves by themselves gave the company a great opportunity to be visible when many shelves were empty.

“I think the way we benefited was we were a snack that was packaged so it wasn’t perishable,” she said. “We weren’t having any supply chain problems.”

Crazy Go Nuts products are also sold at Dollar Tree and Amazon, and the walnut butter is available on shelves at over 1,000 Walmart stores across the country.

Carini herself acknowledges that the name Crazy Go Nuts is unique and strange but is a name that has stuck with the company.

“My great grandfather was from Sicily,” Carini said. “His English was fairly broken, and he had funny phrases he would say. One of them was, ‘Oh you crazy go nuts.’”

Carini also referred to several other roots of the phrase including an expression by Billy Crystal’s impressions of actor Fernando Lamas on Saturday Night Live, as well as a connection to flash-animated comedy web series “Homestar Runner,” who attended the fictional “Crazy Go Nuts University.”

Despite Carini’s concern of the company not being easy to find, Crazy Go Nuts has a unique name that is easily identifiable on social media and Google searches.