Velma’s ‘Wicked Delicious’ Kettle Corn is located in Worcester, Massachusetts. We normally take our popcorn machine to different locations in the New England area, but if you can’t get our kettle korn “wicked fresh”, then you can buy some of our gourment popcorn online.

We’ll even show you our Kettle Corn recipe. Feel free to burn a couple of your own pots and pans at home while trying to recreate it without a popcorn popper. It’s not easy!

Check out our Kettle Corn Blog. See how our intrepid kettle corn poppers delve into the pop corn concession business. Experience the exploits of 2 guys, a girl in a tent. Of course the stuff is wicked delicious, but will anyone else think so to? Find out as it happens!

Want to start your own kettle corn business? How does being your own boss in an all cash business grab ya? We’ve written a 60 page ebook which goes into detail on what you’ll need and where you’ll find it!

Looking for a popper in your area? Skiddaddle on over to our Kettle Corn Directory to find someone who pops local to you. Are you a kettle corn vendor? G’wan over there and add your link. It’s free!

Kettle corn (to use the hackneyed expression) is popcorn that’s “slightly sweet, slightly salty”. It’s NOT caramel corn that’s just been diluted. Where your tastebuds can “max out” while eating something like Crackerjacks or cheese popcorn, kettle corn has a more subtle taste that keeps you coming back for more. Wikipedia has some good info on kettle corn’s origins.

And what about the microwave popcorn version of it? Oh please.. Once you’ve had some from a popcorn kettle, you’ll never go back.

“MA! I need some Velma’s! Quick, ‘bang a u-ee” af-tah this next ‘packy’ and pull inta they-ah!”

Popping live and fresh! Go here:

Tuesdays: Forest Park, Springfield, MA – 12:30-6:00pm

Next to the Cyr Hockey Rink – Free admintance to the park!

Thursdays: Framingham Farmers Market – 12:30-5:30pm

At the Framingham Village Green/Edgell Road

So who makes Velma’s Kettle Corn? Let’s see what you guys look like!

Updated by Eric Bickernicks on 8/6/2011

I normally don’t gush over a product, but this is such a necessary thing if you’re selling stuff from under a tent. www.canopiesbyfred.com sells EZUP awnings, EZUP canopies and other things for your craft fair, farmers market tent. Someone on this site turned me on to them and I immediately bought one. They are the greatest thing. (see video) You get an extra 2 feet of overhang with your tent without going beyond your allotted 10′x10 space.

But I have to give some crap to Freds website.

His website optimization (SEO) stinks. I LOOKED REALLY HARD to find a canopy for my EZ UP tent. I knew these things existed by couldn’t find one online. This is why I got excited when I finally located one. If you do a search for “EZUP Awning” or “EZUP Canopy” Freds site doesn’t show up at all on Google. I think he’s listed as #37 on Yahoo. Fred is losing sales bigtime. In fact, because I’ve labeled this blog entry “EZ UP Canopy By Fred”, I’ll bet my video or this blog entry will appear first before his website.

Next day update: OK, I found Fred’s website. He’s on page 6 for the search term “EZ UP Awning”, this stupid little video on Youtube now shows up on page 4 for the search term “EZUP Awning” (no space). The point of all this is you’ve got to be explicit on your spellings and cover all the variations if you want to be found by Google. I would’ve bought one of Fred’s awnings years ago.

While we’re on the subject of SEO. In my book, “How To Start A Kettle Corn Business” I go into proper web optimization for your website. I had stated that if you want your kettle corn business to be found in your state, include your state in your URL. (i.e. kettlecornkentucky.com) Go ahead, do a search for “kettle corn kentucky” on Google. Guess who? Yup, that’s me on the first page.

Since I set up my Kettle Corn Directory page, Google is now listing me way up there for any search that goes by “kettle corn + state name” for all 50 states. This was never my intention, but this certainly explains why I’m getting people going to my website FROM my kettle corn directory page. OK, fine you guys, DON’T listen to me.

A few days later: I get this email:

Hey Eric! Â What can I say????

I just received some orders and one of the customers said he heard about our

canopy awnings from you. Â He was in California. Â The next customer called me

and he also follows you. Â He was in Washington. Â I understand you have a

following. So I checked out your sight and was sent to You Tube to see the

video.

Thanks so much!! It looked great. Â The best of luck with your business!

Thanks, Â MarvÂ

Next in the THESE ARE ALL FAKED department:

OK, so I went nuts and created an ebook that I’m selling online called “Start Your Own Kettle Corn Business“. I’ve been getting so many questions from people over the years asking about starting a kettle corn business. Most of the questions are exactly the same, so I made it easier on myself to just put all the answers in a book they can download. (There’s also $30 involved – but hey, we sweated our butts off to figure this stuff out.)

I’ve been doing a lot of research about online marketing and the ins and outs of promoting stupid products like this. Mostly it’s about bullshit weight loss products or some other thing which will appeal to the vanity of the great unwashed masses. At least I can say that what I’m selling is legit and I can personally vouch for everything I claim. I sure wish I had a book like this when I got started.

Been back from Hawaii for a couple of weeks and trying to get my head around the now novel concept of extreme cold. Never ran across anyone selling kettle corn from a tent out there. The woman at the car rental place on Oahu filled us in on the kettle corn status of that island. Occasionally someone will pop at a special event, but no one is popping at the giant swap meet at Aloha Stadium. We got into kettle corn because I handed her my Velma’s business credit card and she went “KETTLE CORN?? YOU GUYS DO KETTLE CORN?!”

I got this email from someone recently – I found it very funny.

I like the idea of someone being talked down from the ledge because they haven’t gotten their ketttle corn fix. Instead of cash, maybe we can fence stolen goods for bags of kettle corn so the addicts can get their fix.

So kettle corn season will start up again for us in Springfield during the first week of May. Framingham should start up in June.

Velma spotted this segment on kettle corn last night. Thought I’d toss it up here so everyone could see it. Here’s what I thought:

The cooker looks certainly well built. (I’d say even better than my North Bend. It’s by the Ye Old Kettle Cooker guys.) I’m not crazy about the big brass bucket concept. I certainly LOOKS nice. I’ve never used one, but from what I can tell, you’re dumping very hot kettle corn on top of ready to bag kettle corn. With the North Bend trough, you can push the cooler stuff down and away from the popper and bag it while you’re dumping the hot stuff at the other end. I’ve considered using an even bigger one, that way you can easily have two people bagging while you’re popping.

What the hell gives with that foot pedal whistle? Popping a load of kettle corn already makes a ton of racket, why would you need to make even MORE noise after all that? Steve was doing a similair thing with a pair of scoops. He would bang them together and scream KETTLE CORN after a fresh load. I had to throw scalding corn oil on him to make him stop.

I make these sort of lifestyle video segments during my other job. I was snickering to myself when they showed those two jamokes eating the stuff and giving their feedback. They’re probably the sound guy and an assistant producer. You can tell they weren’t actually selling the stuff at an event, but just dragged a popper and a tent out into the parking lot for demonstration purposes only.

Coming soon: The “How To Start Your Own Kettle Corn Business” online training course! I’ve been researching online affiliate marketing, and I think we’re qualified to make a “how to” guide on kettle corn. With affiliate marketing, YOU can sell this course on your website and you’ll basically get half of the proceeds! More on this to come.

Other news: OK, we’re getting tons of orders online for the Christmas rush and we’re popping a fresh round every time we get about 10 orders. Normally we get a lousy 2 orders a week during the rest of the year, so it’s weird getting so much demand all at once. This happened last year too. Once Christmas is over, we’ll stopping and getting ready for:

The Hawaiian trip for the month of February! As you might’ve seen last year, we did a month long tour of Florida, attempting to make kettle corn for the geriatric crowd. This time we won’t be popping kettle corn in Hawaii, but checking out the farmers markets out there and doing a few reports about the possibilities. More on this in the next post.

Here’s some news I can’t actually tell you about, but I can allude to it. I’ve found somebody on the Internet who took a keen interest in my daily “plight” and has decided to help me make my life easier! (Or should I say, he found ME on the Internet.) I like to call it my new “kettle corn vengeance weapon”. We’ve got a crack team of German scientists working on it now and hopefully we’ll be testing it out at the Palmdale Skunk Works location. If it actually works, I think a lot of other kettle corn poppers can benefit from it. Preliminary tests of “the gadget” says that it does. I hopefully will be getting my sweaty little hands on it within a week or two.

So the start of the school year has tempered the feeding frenzy at our tent. Sales have slightly dropped off at both our locations because of this. Still didn’t have time to shoot any silly video these past few weeks. I got a couple of ideas to try out.

A funny thing happened when we were setting up our tent in Framingham this week. We get there early and start dragging our crap out of the trailer and start setting up. We notice this woman with a notepad was hovering around our tent and was sort of watching us set up. Uh oh, this can’t be good I’m thinking, only health department officials take interest in what you’re doing before you start popping. Surprisingly, the Framingham health department inspector never showed up this year to check us out.

I approach her and go, “OK, you’ve got a notepad, are you a reporter or a health department official?” She looks at me with a surprised expression and told us she was under orders to from her boss to get a kettle corn vendor for her event. She lived nearby, so she wanted to come down early and plead her case to us. I guess the Olde Manse in Concord, Massachusetts is having a new fair and wanted to get some vendors to sell food there. I guess the guy who runs the place is mad about kettle corn and was determined to get some there for this year.

So how do you like that? Who knew we would be the recipients of special treatment. I bet the bread guy doesn’t get courted for anything like this! I felt like giving her the rock star treatment and demanding a dressing room so we could put our aprons on. Anyhoo…we agreed and we’re popping there early in October.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff happening on the weekends during September. I’ll be updating more on that when it happens.