By Jeff Swiatek| jeff.swiatek@indystar.com
“Popcorn has made many lousy movies worth sitting through.”
— Orville Redenbacher
Popcorn has been around since early humans tossed kernels in fires more than 5,000 years ago and discovered a tasty treat.
We know that the Aztecs used popcorn in ceremonies. Peruvian Indians made it a dietary side dish. In the 19th century, the age of automation brought machines that helped simplify the popping and eliminate singed fingers.
But it took a Purdue-trained farmer, educator and agriculturalist with a penchant for putting more pop in popcorn to lift it to star snack status.
In the end, he would sell his name to do it. And his quest might not have succeeded but for one stroke of bad judgment.
Orville Redenbacher grew up in Clay County, earning money by selling popcorn planted on the family farm.
After earning a degree in agriculture from Purdue University, he worked as a teacher and county extension agent for almost a decade before being hired in January 1940 as manager of Princeton Farms.
No longer in existence, it was then the state’s largest farm, with 12,000 acres in crops and cattle.
It was there that Redenbacher furthered his popcorn quest. He helped turn Princeton Farms, partly owned by the Hulman family that has long run Indianapolis Motor Speedway, into the nation’s largest popcorn grower and seller.
The tale of Orville Redenbacher and popcorn is related in books and newspaper profiles, company biographies and on Wikipedia. Nowhere is there mention that Redenbacher was given an ultimatum by his bosses at Princeton Farms in late 1950 to quit or be fired.
The reason: Redenbacher deposited a check from a tenant farmer into his personal account.
“He tried to get away with it and got caught,” said Kevin Fish, one of Redenbacher’s 13 grandchildren, who mentions the incident in his unpublished biography of Redenbacher.
“My mom told me all of this,” said Fish, a part-time teacher in California. “She told me the details and initially she didn’t want me to put it in the book, but I did. It helps put perspective in the book.”
Seen through the rearview mirror of history, the incident proved fateful. Having lost his job, Redenbacher would team with a partner in 1951 to buy a small seed company in Valparaiso where Redenbacher would invent the fluffy popcorn hybrid that would bear his name and bring him and his home state fame.
Another grandson, Gary Redenbacher, who starred with his grandfather in 80 TV commercials advertising Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popcorn, also knows of the incident.
“I asked Grandpa about it,” said Gary Redenbacher, an attorney in California.
“He confirmed it. Grandpa admitted he had taken some money, but he (said he) had paid it back.”
If the incident hadn’t happened, said Gary Redenbacher, his grandfather might well have remained a farm manager and never donned the crown he holds as Popcorn King.
A public relations machine
“Orville was a brass buttons and blue ribbon man. He loved the spotlight and the public attention.”
— Partner Charlie Bowman on Orville Redenbacher
Popcorn in Indiana also wouldn’t be what it is without Orville Redenbacher’s gift for PR.
At Chester Inc., the Valparaiso seed and fertilizer company that Redenbacher and Bowman bought, it was one thing to develop a superior popcorn variety in 1965. It was another to market it.
Although the popcorn was selling well regionally, Chester didn’t have the marketing budget or knack for selling the brand nationally, said its chairman, Larry Holt.
In 1971, hospitalized with an ulcer, Redenbacher agreed to sell his popcorn brand to a division of former food giant Hunt-Wesson. Hunt-Wesson eventually took full control of the popcorn business, paying $4 million for it and one other thing that’s proven priceless: the right to the Orville Redenbacher name.
Redenbacher appeared in TV commercials for popcorn until his death in 1995 at age 88. The popular TV spots, usually featuring the quip-happy Redenbacher in his trademark bow tie, vaulted the brand to the nation’s top seller, where it remains, with a 34 percent U.S. market share for microwave, ready-to-eat and kernel products. Total sales of the Redenbacher brand in the latest 52-week tracking: $360 million.
Indiana ties
remain strong
“I crusaded most of my life to do away with unspeakably ordinary popcorn.”
— Orville Redenbacher
Now owned by Omaha, Neb.-based food conglomerate ConAgra, Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popcorn still relies on Indiana for much of its production. About a third of the 60,000 to 70,000 acres planted with popcorn in Indiana every year are growing for the Orville Redenbacher brand.
Clark Beard, a fourth-generation Clinton County farmer who grows popcorn on 550 acres for ConAgra, said he is told by the company what varieties to plant each year, and a ConAgra field agent constantly checks his farm to make sure he’s growing the crop the right way.
Beard said he makes $50 an acre extra by growing popcorn rather than regular field, or dent, corn on his land. He likes the thought that his corn ends up in America’s top popcorn brand.
Beard even has calculated how many single-serve microwave bags he could fill with popcorn from his fields: 8 million.
Much of the rest of Indiana’s popcorn acreage is used by Weaver Popcorn, which has steadily grown its family-owned company into a global presence, with a 30 percent share of the world market, compared with about 25 percent five years ago, President Mike Weaver said.
Pop Weaver, a corporate sponsor of this year’s State Fair, has proven that the Redenbacher approach to sales and promotion using a higher-priced name brand isn’t the only way to go.
Weaver prices low and sells much of its popcorn to relabelers and as a no-name commodity product to a modern world craving the snack of the Aztecs.
The Popcorn King’s remains may have been scattered as ashes in the Pacific Ocean, near the San Diego area condo he bought soon after selling his popcorn brand.
But his likeness is still, appropriately, in Indiana. Last year, Valparaiso raised donations to put a life-size bronze sculpture of Redenbacher in a downtown park.
Gail Tuminello, one of three daughters of Orville and Corinne Redenbacher, who lives just outside Valparaiso in a house bordering a farm field, calls the statue “a really good likeness.”
“You can sit by him,” she said of the statue, posed on a park bench. “He’s got his arm on the back of the chair. He would have liked the idea of it.”
Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317) 444-6483.
