Air-popped popcorn topped with handcrafted coatings made from scratch. It's old-fashioned good! Our Story:
We often are asked how we began our popcorn business. The answer is that we began making popcorn from our home in 2010 to make extra money at farmer’s markets, craft shows, etc... . Pat had been laid off from her job and was back in college; Gene was a waiter at a local restaurant. During th
is busy time of job-searching, school, working misfitting jobs, and more, our daughter Amy asked for Peanut Butter popcorn for her birthday. Pat had only made gooey, delicious peanut butter popcorn at home for the kids and occasional together times with friends. We knew NOTHING about making popcorn to sell, but making it to earn extra money seemed like a good idea - at the time. :-)
We found a local farmer to buy popcorn from, and looked at the equipment and supplies available that would help us in our “great idea.” Disappointedly (is that a word?), we realized that Unemployment pay and waiter wages don’t allow for investments. Any SANE person would have shrugged their shoulders, continued looking for that perfect job, and made the requested Peanut Butter popcorn as a birthday treat. Not us...we’re not sane. We decided to go to Meijer and found a hot-air popcorn popper! After much research, expensive boo-boos, chasing neighbors away by offering them experimental samples, incorporating Pat’s then-Econ professor and others as tasters, we began to figure out how to make gourmet popcorn from hot-air popped corn. Our mission was to get away from the popular way of coating popcorn so people could discover that coated popcorn can taste really good, without a lot of ingredients we can’t pronounce. Besides, we couldn’t afford what others were adding to their popcorn, or topping it with. So, we used basic ingredients. We researched multiple companies to find more wholesome ingredients and began sampling what they offered. We wanted it to taste good and real. We wanted it to be “old-fashioned good.”
Our process was to coat one batch at a time that started with 1.5 cups of popped corn. Then we had to coat it and dry it in our oven. We could only fit one batch at a time into our oven. The batch consisted of two small roaster pans of a certain size. Gene’s first tumbler to mix the popcorn in was an orange cooler. Pat made the candied toppings on the stove and then mixed the toppings in our 18-quart roaster. It worked...slowly and in smaller batches. Not to bore you with ALL the details (cuz we do that sometimes - sigh-h 🤦♀️), we still make our popcorn the same way we did at home - hot-air popped corn with simple ingredients we put together ourselves. That is, unless we find a really cool combination of something like lavendar and rosemary sea salt...can’t wait to try that on something! 😋 We’re happy to give you a tour, answer any questions you may have, and let you sample whatever we have available. We love what we do. We LOVE our customers...thank you for Poppin’ In!
