FOOD: Jumping Bean

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Rarely has the discerning palate been assailed by a less pretentious offering: a raw string bean, pickled in vinegar and dill. Yet the Dilly Bean, touted as "the best idea since the peanut and the pretzel," last week had captured the fancy of cocktail-hour nibblers on the East and West coasts, and was rapidly making tycoons out of two ex-schoolmarms who run Manhattan's Park & Hagna Inc.. the bean's maker. People also serve Dilly Beans in martinis, salads, sandwiches, cream cheese and beef Stroganoff—and have discovered that poodles love them. Eaten right from the jar, the spicy, nonfattening (1.5 calories each) green beans have inspired a new party sport: watching the expression of a novice trying his first one.

The Dilly Bean's success is a tribute to the power of advertising. Armed with her mother's Southern recipe for pickled beans, a North Carolinian named Sonya Hagna, 24, decided to give up her New Jersey schoolteaching job in 1958 and take a fling at pickling. She enlisted Fellow Schoolteacher Jacquelyn Park, 25, began pickling Dilly Beans and packing them by hand, then set up Park & Hagna with joint capital of $4,000, engaged a fledgling ad agency named Papert, Koenig & Lois. The agency suggested an irreverent ad campaign aimed at making dilly-tantes out of people who like to try new things.

Before long, New Yorkers were reading such whimsical ads as "Diane Shugrue ate 3,925 Dilly Beans last month. She didn't gain an ounce. (Is she tired of Dilly Beans!)" Radio listeners were subjected to a barrage of zany plugs interspersed with 20 seconds of weird "music to eat Dilly Beans by." One ad advised: "If your neighborhood grocer doesn't have a jar, knock something off the shelf on the way out." So many customers took it seriously that some grocers complained, and Dilly Bean changed its advice, now lightly urges frustrated customers: "Move to another neighborhood."

This year Park & Hagna will sell some 360,000 jars, worth about $157,000, in 32 states; next year it hopes to sell 6,000,000 jars, advertise its beans nationally, also come out with a relish.