We’ve recently added a new ingredient to our menu, and we’d like to take this occasion to celebrate it: let’s hear it for the all-American pecan!

Native to this land, the buttery-rich pecan takes its name from the Algonquin word pakan, which means “a nut so hard it has to be cracked with a stone”. Thomas Jefferson was an early fan of these large, smooth, hard nuts. He liked them so much that he gave pecan trees to George Washington, who planted them at Mount Vernon. Since pecan trees can live to be over a thousand years old (and grow to be a hundred feet tall), their legacy still surrounds many such sites of early American history.

Today, the United States produces about eighty percent of the world’s pecans. The pecan tree is even the state tree of Texas. If you’d like to pour a little stars and stripes in your breakfast bowl, consider this: pecan pairs beautifully with apple. Layer them over our cinnamon crunch cereal base, and you’ve got Apple Pie Crunch! Cereal + patriotism = yum.