OK, so this wasn’t the FIRST day out product was there, but it was the first time *I* was able to come out and sell to the crowd. We’ve been selling our product at the Natick Indoor Winter Market for about a month. They recently started the Natick Outdoor Farmers Market last week, and Dan from the Easton Simpson Spring Beverages had our product on their table. I was able to hammer the crowd hard with our samples and I was able to sell twice as much.

So let’s see how we do WITHOUT our kettle! The Natick health department forbade us from popping live at this event, which is just as good because we’ve got other events we’re covering on Saturdays. The big concern is can we move product without the smell and noise that the kettle generates? As it stands now, we pop at my home location and drive the product and tent out to these new events. We’ll be doing the same at the Jamaica Plain Farmers Market in Boston in about a month. We’re also selling pre-popped kettle corn at the Easton Farmers Market on Saturdays too. That’ll be 3 events we’re covering without a kettle! The big experiment is can we continue to scale this type of thing of pre-popped product to other events? We can only pop live on some many days of the week.

Natick Farmers Market – Saturday 9-1 pm
Natick Common – Map: http://goo.gl/maps/3DAHX

We’ve done the Sudbury’s Save A Dog event at the Wayside Innf for a few years now and it’s always fun. The place is over run with poochies and since Dan and I are dog owners, we really have a fun time. The weather was perfect, the crowd came out and we did alright for event this size. I started to shoot a video which would’ve been only of dogs eating kettle corn, but got too busy to really make it unique. We’ll be back to this location in September when the Colonial Re-enactment people do their thing here.

Yay! We’re back out in the tent for the start of the 2013 season! This Earth Day event started only recently, I think last year was its first time. We were skeptical it would work so early in the season, but it’s been busy every year for us. It’s almost like everyone is dying to get out of the house from the winter and get a good dose of fresh air. This location is the same spot where the Framingham Farmers Market is located, so we have bunches of returning customers who are excited to re-ignite their kettle corn fix.

Apparently many towns are into this “Earth Day” type of event. We’re doing one in Jamaica Plain in Boston on May 4th and I know of a few others. They wanted us to use paper bags to serve our kettle corn in, but we balked at this big time – many people take their bags home and our product will be ruined by the time they would have eaten it. Yup, we’re just like those giant conglomerates: save the Earth? But what about our PROFITS? I think if we also sold booze and guns we could’ve covered all the politically incorrect bases. Buy your Velma’s Single Malt Whiskey and Velma’s AR-15 ammo here today!

Hanson’s Farm has been next to us at the Framingham Farmers Market for years. We noticed that they host a haunted hayride during October and we wanted to try and sell some kettle corn to their customers. It would be kind of a “mutual destruction” type of thing, hopefully we both would benefit. We also wanted to see the what the actual farm was like.

The video above basically explains what was going on. Dan and I were able to take the tour and got to experience the whole she-bang. It was fun. Both of us are from a film and lighting background, so we were designing all sorts of enhanced layouts of the ride and agreed it would be fun to work on something like this. There was a descent enough crowd that night and we sold an OK amount of kettle corn. There’s never a crazy amount of people here because the event takes place over the course of a few weeks, so it really wasn’t as lucrative as we hoped. We just did this one experiment of popping for the night and had a great time doing it.

OK, so we’re NOT doing the Hyannis Farmers Market. (But boy, did we get close.) This year I’ve been looking for new markets to pop since I’ve recently moved to the Buzzards Bay area. We’ve been hearing all sorts of great things about the Hyannis Farmers Market. Hyannis is basically the hub of Cape Cod, a real tourist magnet in the summer and probably the town with the most businesses on the Cape. The farmers market itself if on the main drag and just down the street from a tourist hotspot. The vendors we’ve spoken to all said that it’s a jumping place, we should try to do it.

Cynthia, the market manager was very enthusiastic about having us pop there. We were all set to go, the final hurdle was getting the OK from the board of health since we prepare food onsite. They need to give us a temporary food permit, sort of along the lines of what a catering company does. The word came back that they won’t issue a permit for someone who will come back every week, they will only issue a permit for someone who will do an event once. (!) As I’ve mentioned in my kettle corn training course, health departments are never consistent. We never really got a clear answer as to why popping 4 times a month is unacceptable verses just once. Apparently a previous pizza guy was trying to cook at the market and they had an issue with him.