OK, this got MY panties in a twist. Velma and I are popping away in Springfield, having a good day when this little man walks up to me with a petulant look on his face. He doesn’t identify himself or tell me his name. “I understand you’ve been telling people that your product is kosher”, he says. I tell him that we’ve never told anyone that our kettle corn is kosher. In fact, when someone ASKS, we’ve always done a long-winded spiel about how rabbis have come by and told us that we COULD be kosher with the ingredients we’re using, but need to cough up some money and get certified. So we’ve always told anyone who asks, that our product is NOT kosher.

He then fires off a tirade about how this could lead to legal action against us and lawyers will be involved. At this point I assume this little nettlesome character is a rabbi. I tried to repeat what I had just told him…more slowly this time. He abruptly cuts me off and says that TWO people have told him that we’ve been telling people that it’s kosher, and we better stop saying it and that’s IT. (Including a curt little hand gesture.)

At this point I’m thinking how could anyone have thought that we told them this? Then it occurs to me - Steve has a funny satirical riff where he explains what our kettle corn ISN’T. (Free range, organic, low-fat, boneless, Dolphin safe, fair trade, kosher.) Click on the graphic on the main page called “Steve’s not quite true sales pitch” to hear his spiel.

You’ll notice on our website we blatantly spell out that what you’re hearing is NOT TRUE. Anyone with a flake of gray matter would realize that kettle corn CAN’T be free range, nor can something made with white sugar be organic or low-fat, there are no BONES in kettle corn. It has NOTHING to do with dolphins and nothing to do with imports, fair trade or otherwise. Therefore, it isn’t kosher either.

We thought Steve was being painfully obvious in his intent. It’s kind of like being sarcastic to someone, but they take what you’re saying to be literally true. Apparently, when some nitwit online listened to Steve’s silly riff, their little brains filtered out the part where we mention our kettle corn has no BONES or DOLPHINS in it and just heard the word “kosher.” Ah ha, now I think I got it. I start to explain all this to my diminutive antagonist. He doesn’t want to hear any of it, reiterates his threat, and gives me the curt hand gesture one last time, driving his point home.

When I told Steve all this, he couldn’t believe people could be so thick. He agreed that he’ll alter his spiel for the completely dim out there. It pains me to no end that I now have to put another “Velma sign” up saying our kettle corn is NOT KOSHER. What’s a “Velma sign”? Little notices that we hang from our tent telling the public FUCKING OBVIOUS things, just so we can’t be held liable. (There are un-popped kernels in it.  Our stuff has sugar in it. It is made fresh.)  I kind of scoffed at Velma for putting them up, figuring people in general can’t be THAT stupid. *HEAVY SIGH*

Velma here: Ha! I told him so!

Didn’t get a change to shoot any video this week. Both Springfield and Framingham turned into a record days so I was going nuts on both days.

 8/18/08 update:

Hey look what I got!

I guess when you’ve got lawyers on staff, they’ve got to keep themselves busy somehow. “Let’s get that guy in the tent before he goes after our Pulitzer Prize stuff next!” (I had to remove the photo of me and a caption that went with it.) Here’s a link to the original article on the Boston Globe website.

===== Eric’s original text ======

OK, so I know this is no BIG deal, but there’s always something to bitch about when you get into the media. First, Erica never got back to me when this thing was going to be published. I know it’s just a little crappy side-bar thing she did, but I discovered that we were in the paper when I walked into my corporate job today and saw the article stuck on a cubicle wall. We didn’t get a link, even though a gave her a couple of magnets with our website on there. (They screwed up the TT Buds link too, I found their real one.)

The photographer originally came by on June 26th. I mentioned it on this blog post a while back.

While I’m still bashing everyone: I’ve known about T.T. Buds kettle corn for a while. I saw a bag of their stuff at a farm stand I was trying to get our stuff into. Their kettle corn looked kinda skimpy, it didn’t look like they used very much sugar to get a decent coating on it.  But don’t take my word, see what Taquitos.NET said about them. Then read our review on the same website. On top of that they claim their stuff has a shelf life of at least a month. Yeah right. I take that back, if you hardly use any oil when popping, kettle corn will stay edible longer.

Velma and I went to Boston’s Fenway Park not to see the Red Sox, but their triple A affiliate the Pawsox at the Futures of Fenway day this week. I heard that they sell kettle corn at Fenway Park and I finally found it, behind the bleacher section in the Big Concourse food area. A bunch of people had said that it’s really good, but it’s not. Lemme explain:

First, the guy is stirring the kettle with a baseball bat. At first glance this is cool and obviously ties in with the whole baseball park theme.  But if you want to properly mix the oil and sugar together while it’s heating, you need something with a little more “push”. Also, the guy was just stirring it with one hand while standing behind a screen.

Second, their sign said they use a mix of soybean oil and corn oil but they’re using vegetable oil as you can see in the photo. I’ve tested this particular oil and have come to conclusion that it’s not as tasty as regular corn oil. Of course it’s a lot cheaper than corn oil, but what do they care?

Third, their kettle temperature isn’t hot enough to make the popcorn really explode and fluff up enough to our taste. You can tell this by how the kettle corn looks and feels. I’ve tried making kettle corn with an industrial electric popper and it had the same texture to it. Not having enough heat makes the corn come out like movie style popcorn, crunchy but not fluffy. This is why the guy was able to make kettle corn with one hand while hiding behind a screen. He’s SLOWLY cooking it so nothing burns.

They were using the same brand of popcorn (Act II) and sugar (Domino) as we use. You would figure it would taste pretty much the same, but alas…it doesn’t. Still, the other option at Fenway was to buy the pre-packaged Popcorn Indiana crap. Did I mention that I wouldn’t even feed that stuff to the squirrels that come to my porch?

We are now the victims of our own success. We just had a record day at the Springfield farmers’ market. The days are now turning into a grind and we no longer have time to chat with each other or interact with the customers or other vendors. We just spend 5 hours constantly stirring, popping, scooping, sealing and selling.

We went through 10 jugs of oil. Each 1 gallon jug of oil produces 5 batches or kettlefuls of kettle corn. Approx total for the day: 50 “loads” of kettle corn.  That’s about 1 batch every 6 minutes for 5 hours straight.  I know I was popping as hard as I could for the first 2 hours and Steve was going nuts bagging the stuff. This easily beats the best day we had at the Brimfield Antique Show where we paid more than $300 EACH DAY to have the privilege of popping there.

I recently got email from someone who makes kettle corn at the huge Hershey Amusement Park in Pennsylvania.  They were wondering why I wore so much protective gear when I pop, because their kettle doesn’t get hot enough to send second degree burn causing little missiles at them. They guy said he doesn’t even wear a face mask.  (I would bet good money that his kettle corn tastes a lot like the kettle corn at Fenway Park.) He also mentioned that they do about 50 loads of kettle corn a day at their busiest spot. This was news to me, since that’s what I’m doing now at a little farmers’ market in Springfield.  Boy do I need to come up with a motorized cover to keep up with demand and keep myself out of the heat.

I just went back and took a look at our first blog entry.  We first did this Springfield spot almost 3 years ago and we had sold only 50 bags that first day.  Who knew it would come to this?

On the other end of the spectrum, our other location in Framingham got pretty much rained out this week. Veggies do fine in a rainstorm, but water and popcorn really don’t mix well. So if anyone is doing the numbers in their head and thinking they can make a killing selling kettle corn, make sure you add in rain days where profits almost drop to zero.  Did I mention it sucks to be breaking down and loading up a trailer and getting drenched in the rain AFTER you’ve made no money?

8/11/08 Update:

So Velma and I are going into Sam’s Club to get our supplies for the week.  We see this guy loading up his pickup truck with bags of popcorn, sugar and salt.  I asked him if he’s doing kettle corn and he told me that his main location is at Fenway Park!  We chat for a while and he says that he has the same set up at Harvard Stadium. I explain that we do quite well with farmers markets in this area, but fail to mention this website to him. Hopefully he won’t find this website and find out that we’re kettle corn back-stabbing assholes.

So this old Russian guy came by last year and really got Velma’s panties in a twist. I guess he was expecting to trade some little plastic toys for kettle corn. Apparently the guy just took a bag of kettle corn off our table and left the crap in it’s place. We suspected he was just playing the role of “ignorant foreign guy” who figured he could do and get what he wanted. Velma was having none of it. The guy came by again this year and was hocking cheap jewelry, so Steve and I went for it. See the video below for all the details.

We’ve been doing very steady business at both our locations.  Steve and I joke that we USED to take a book with us, just in case it got slow.  I barely have time to eat lunch and take a drink during Springfield.  I’ve got an idea on a motorized lid for the kettle.  Not sure when I can build the thing, but it would increase productivity if it works.

We’ve also had some weird things happen with our BUY KETTLE CORN page.  We’ve received some emails in the past which look like a “phishing” scam.  We’ve been ignoring them up till now, except when I decided to ream the spammer a new asshole.  Come to find out that it WASN’T a spammer, but a legit customer who ended up filling out the wrong order cart.  Not sure how it happened, but we’re looking into it big time.

We thought we had a record day at Springfield this week, but it turns out we were $75 short of that goal. (We went through 8 1/2 oils this week.) What’s amazing is that this amount of sales matches what we made ON THE BEST DAY at the Brimfield Antique Festival. This was a spot where we had to pay more than $300 per day to set up there, and we now sell the same amount on a daily basis in Springfield for $15.

If you’ve been reading his blog, you would have seen that I made some t-shirts about a year ago. They just had the Velma’s logo on the front and this website address on the back. I think I sold about 3 of ‘em and gave away the rest. I just sold all the silk screening supplies to someone on craigslist.org. I found a new t-shirt method and another idea I want to try.

First off, the silk screening method works great if you want to print on many things with few colors for the cheapest price. It doesn’t print details and subtle colors very well and it’s a major pain in the ass to clean up after you’ve done a run of shirts. There are other methods of printing on a shirt.

Heat press transfers and dye sublimation seem to be the way to go if you want to print a photo or colorful design on a shirt on a short production. Once you have the stuff to do this, you can bang out single shirts and change the design as you go along, or even try different designs each time.

I had originally wanted to do a goofy cartoon design for my first T-shirt, but never decided on what a cartoon Velma should look like. I was an art student back in high school and always loved MAD magazine and the style of those drawings. (I especially loved Basil Wolverton.) I also remember seeing these trading cards called Odd Rods, drawn by the artist BK Taylor. Odd Rods are these oversized, grotesque monsters driving automobiles. The cards and T-shirts of the same designs were kinda popular back in the 70’s. Since everyone is calling our product “kettle crack”, I want to do a design of an actual kettle crack addict eating the stuff while having the words KETTLE CRACK right on there, and maybe toss our name and website on there too.

I like the idea of having it in the style of the original Odd Rods style. Then I thought it would be really cool if I could get BK Taylor to do the drawing. I found his agent online and shot out an email to her to see how much it would cost to commission BK Taylor to do it, figuring it would be too expensive to get the ORIGINAL guy to do this. She said that $750 will get me an electronic file of the final drawing. Apparently BK Taylor keeps the original drawing; I won’t own the copyright.

I dunno. $750 is kinda steep to shell out for an uncertain idea of mine. I still need to buy the heat press and printer to actually make the T-shirts, and I’ll only be making $7 - $8 per shirt. I need to move 90 shirts before I even start making a profit? Hoo boy…I dunno. I may take a crack at doing the design myself and see what’s left of my high school drawing skills.

Not too much to report, just that it’s been hot and sales have been steady.  We’re selling near record amounts of bags in Springfield constantly, so I hardly have time to sit down and have lunch.  This goes on for 6 hours straight.  At this point we physically can’t pop much more unless we get a third person to help.  I’m gonna start looking into making a motorized kettle cover which can stir the stuff while I bag.  I guess we’re now the victims of our success.  The days are starting to feel like a grind.  I barely have time to shoot any silly video.

I seem to be turning into the Internet kettle corn answer man.  Because we have such high rankings on Google, everyone finds us first.  A bunch of people who’ve started their own kettle corn biz have been asking me all sorts of questions on how to do it.  One guy in California got access to a large event of 23,000 people.  Apparently he buys a kettle from North Bend Originals and asks me how much supplies he would need to make 25,000 bags of kettle corn.  I tell him that 100 bags an hour is a full throttle, flat out amount of kettle corn that is almost humanly possible to make.  I also tell him that after 8 hours of this, you’d want to put a bullet in your head.

I then get an email from him saying that he NOW got the specifics of the event and he probably won’t be doing it. They want $400 per day AND 25% of the net.  (I was wondering if they at least paid for the anal lubricant.)  I explained the math to him and he agreed that it wasn’t worth doing it.  A typical farmers market only wants $15 out of you.  I’ve recently gotten offers from some “big” events in my area and I just laugh when I see the entry fees.

Springfield Farmers Market, June 24th

So weather.com said there will be thunderstorms in Springfield starting at 9 am, more at 12 noon, again at 3 pm and getting worse by 6 pm. OK fine, we’ll go anyways and sell some soggy kettle corn to the hardcore. I bring enough supplies to have a record day of sales during a typhoon.

We get there and setup. No rain, it’s a perfect day. Lines are starting to form every few minutes, Steve and I can’t even stop to get a bite to eat. I start hoping that it’ll rain so we can take a break. They continue to buy the stuff, I’m paddling like crazy to keep up.

We run out at 5 o’clock, an hour before closing. Not a drop of precipitation anywhere. We would’ve had a record day if I had brought more oil. (We ran through 9 jugs.) Now we’re seeing a lot of sad faces. Some kid even started to cry that he didn’t get this weeks kettle corn. God I hate weather.com.

Steve found this cartoon in the newspaper.

Wayland Farmers Market, June 25th

We had popped here last year on the last day of the market. Peg, the market manager was all psyched to have us back and hopefully be there this year. I had explained that I also had a corporate job where I sat in traffic for an hour and a half just to GET into Boston, stayed in a windowless basement room and edited insurance videos for 8 hours, then got back into traffic and sat there for another hour and a half just to get home. Thus, I couldn’t make kettle corn on EVERY Wednesday because I need to maintain my other income. She wanted to know what was wrong with me. She also had used a sign for our spot with read “Velma’s Wicked Good Kettle Corn”. I pointed out her error and she felt bad for the screw up, even though “wicked good” is correct improper Bostonian usage.

So this Farmers Market is about the same size as the Framingham one. It’s nestled right next to a busy street and is located in an upscale area. It’s associated with the Russells’ Garden center in Wayland, Massachusetts. I didn’t realize it at first, but there’s about 50 employees who work there, and once they started breathing in the kettle corn “fumes”, they all had to have a bag.

Eh…we did barely OK. (2 and a half jugs of oil) The Framingham Farmers market was like this before we got known in the area. I’m sure if we stuck with it, we could get a pretty loyal following for this area. Thing is, it would probably take a years worth of popping for it to really start to pay off. If I cross off Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays off my corporate schedule, I’ll have nothing to fall back on when winter comes.

Framingham Farmers Market, June 26th

Another grey and kind of rainy day. (I didn’t even bother to look at weather.com) The interesting news was last night we got 2 emails. Somebody from the Boston Globe wants to do a food story on us. Another person in San Francisco wants to do a another kettle corn story. I guess kettle corn is the latest trend in food. I thought it’s been a “trend” for the past 10 years.

The Boston Globe photographer showed up today and took a bunch of “snaps” of us doing our thing. I guess we’ll be speaking with the Globe reporter tomorrow. I should be speaking with the San Francisco reporter later tonight. I’ll definitely post the articles here once I get ‘em. Fox news was also here shooting some footage of one of the vegetable guys. I’m convinced there’s a big news agency somewhere that notifies all the other news outlets on June 25th that Farmers Market season started, thus, they should do something on it.

We did alright for a drizzly day. (almost 5 oils sold.) We’re getting solid customer feedback. Many people are now buying a couple of bags at a time. This is the same buying curve we experienced with Springfield when that started to pick up on us last year.

So how do you like that, they remembered us! (Either that, or the mental kettle corn groove we dug into their minds.) We had a pretty busy day at the Framingham Farmers Market - 5 oils sold. We use jugs of corn oil as a measurement of how much we popped, since we always start with unopened containers. I guess sticking with this farmers market all last year is starting to pay off this year. (Note to anyone who is reading this and is in the kettle corn biz. There’s money to be made by building slow and steady at these smaller weekly events.)

We had done some online marketing this past week, and even though it didn’t impact our sales that much, it shows that it works and that it takes time. I had made this poster earlier in the week and we intended on finding all the bulletin boards within a 3 mile radius of this farmers market and slapping them up there. Craigslist.org has a section on local events, so I posted one there in the Massachusetts Metrowest section. I had tried sticking on into the FREE section, but they don’t allow “promotional” items. Eh, I tried.

Since we’re actually GIVING something away, I thought we should take a crack at sending an email to anyone on myspace.com who were local to the Framingham Farmers Market. Velma thought we were entering the world of “spam”, but I thought that it fell into the category of “news”, PLUS we were giving something tangible away for free, no strings attached. Who wouldn’t want to know about that?

So how do you find people on myspace.com who are only local to you? Simple. Go to Google and enter exactly this:

“female - framingham” site:myspace.com

(Show omitted results)  This means I’m looking for any female who has a profile page that says that they’re from Framingham ONLY on the website myspace.com. Do the same thing for males and pick the town you want. Obviously you already need a page on myspace to send a message to someone on there. I think we found about 80 people, got 12 or so positive emails back from them and one person showed up and claimed a free sample bag. Foolishly she starting eating the bag there, compelling her to BUY a bag when she was done. Normally when marketing stuff, 1 percent return on a mailing is expected, 3 percent is good. It didn’t take us 100 “spams” to get a sale, and many people said that they’d be coming down at some point.

Speaking of sales - we were moved out from under our nice shady spot and were stuck at the end of the row of tents. I guess some DPW guy was obsessed with the new trees they had planted next to the road and they didn’t want us anywhere near them. OK fine. We were next to the frozen beef tent that sells high quality meats. Velma got the impression that they were getting annoyed that no one wanted to pay $6 a pound for high quality beef, yet MANY people were willing to shell out 6 bucks for a bag of our crap. (My words.) I guess I would be annoyed with mankind too.