January 19, 2023 – Popcorn

It’s National Popcorn Day! Archeologists have discovered that people have known about popcorn for thousands of years. The oldest definitive evidence of popcorn was discovered in New Mexico and dated to as early as 3600 BCE.
In the 1800s, popcorn was eaten as a breakfast cereal, with milk and a sweetener. Popcorn’s accessibility and popularity increased with the invention of the popcorn maker in the 1890s. A Chicago candy store owner, Charles Cretors, had developed several steam powered machines for roasting nuts, and applied the same technology to corn kernels. By the turn of the century, he had deployed street carts equipped with his new popcorn maker.
The snack became very popular during the Great Depression, as it was pretty inexpensive at 5-10 cents a bag. While many other businesses failed, the popcorn business was thriving. It became a source of income for many struggling farmers, including the Redenbacher family, who would later become the namesake for Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn brand.
The Great Depression is also when popcorn became a popular snack at movie theaters. Initially, many theater owners were against the snack, because it was messy and they thought it would be distracting. Street vendors would sell popcorn to patrons outside the theater, and it quickly became hard to ignore the financial appeal of selling the snack. So theater owners started leasing lobby space to vendors for a daily fee. Eventually though, they cut out the middleman and started selling the concessions themselves. Today, the markup on movie theater popcorn is an astounding 1,275%! The reason concessions are marked up so much is because that’s really the only place theaters make a profit. Most of the ticket sales go straight to the movie studios.
During World War II, sugar rations slowed candy production, so popcorn became an extremely popular snack. During this time, Americans ate 3 times as much popcorn as they had before! The first microwave oven popcorn bag was patented in 1981 by General Mills, which sharply increased popcorn consumption. Today, Americans eat around 14 billion quarts of popcorn every year – that’s an average of 43 quarts per person! Learn more here.