Making the best Popcorn

[Darin Steffl]

I'm new to the Theatre industry and bought a single screen in my hometown in March 2020 right before the Covid shutdown. It's my hobby to my primary ISP business so it didn't hurt me but I'm learning as much as I can.

When I bought it, the owners were using Sam's Club kernels, LouAna coconut oil, LouAna butter flavored topping, Snappy fine salt for popping and shaker salt.

Since then, I have switched to Pop Weaver Gold kernels, still using LouAna coconut oil, and Funtastic butter flavored topping, Flavacol salt in each batch we pop, and keeping Snappy fine salt for the shakers.

I have read old forums posts about people liking Supur-Kist topping from ODell's. Is this the way to go for topping?


What is everyone using for their great tasting theatre popcorn? Kernels, popping oil, topping, salts, maybe your kettle like Cretors or something else?

I'm willing to try new things in order to offer great tasting popcorn. Our current popcorn tastes better than the multiplexes near us but if I can make it even better, I want to.

[Frank Cox]

If you really want the best popcorn then use butter. None of this "topping oil" crap.

The phrase HOT BUTTERED POPCORN exists for a reason.

I buy butter at the local Coop and melt that down to put on the popcorn and I'm convinced that sells the popcorn. My menu board says "Popcorn with Real Butter" and everyone appreciates that.

There's no extra charge for extra butter either. Some folks want "butter in the middle" and I can do that. No butter at all? I can do that too. The price is the same with extra butter or none. Want to come back with your half-eaten bucket of popcorn and get more butter? Sure, no charge!

EDIT TO ADD:
One additional point that I should make about using butter: You'll probably have to do some experimenting to find the best brand of butter to use for that purpose.

Some brands of butter seem to have a very high water content. You wouldn't notice that if you're just putting it on your toast, but when you melt down several pounds in a pot you suddenly have a half-pot of water sitting on the butter. If you can find the right brand, you'll just get a spoonful of water out of a pound of butter and it's easy to just give the pump a couple of squirts and pump that off at the beginning of the night before you start serving it.

Don't serve the butter until you've got the water off of it because it'll shrink the popcorn.

[James Wyrembelski]

We get our popcorn from a local farm. They've served this theatre for all three of their generations. I also get the oil directly from them and they provide us with corn oil.

We also use Sunglo popcorn salt and the same topping as you.

We also just got our new popper in. I have to upgrade the electrical to get it installed so it's sitting out in the auditorium. I've had a few people worried that the machine won't make the corn as good as our 85 year old machine. We'll see!

[Jack Ondracek]

Anyone who's really being honest here would tell you that you have to content yourself with being second-best... to them! Just look at the websites out there. We ALL serve the BEST popcorn... Sorry, pal!

That said, I don't (personally) think you're far off the mark. I prefer the Weaver gold to Orville's because it pops larger and doesn't tend to break up when you sift out the culls. We also have a "popcorn farm" in our state, and the effects of Covid on the supply chain has me just now looking into local sourcing.

The Lou-Ana coconut oil is OK, though I think it's a bit pale in the color department. I grew up with Vo-Pop coconut oil, so I think I tend to prefer it because of the deeper color. It's hard to find in my part of the country now. When I can get it, the Funtastic coconut oil is pretty close. Personally, I don't like the blends... any of them.

I have used Flavacol my whole life. Anyone who uses Savorol or white popcorn salt can keep it. It's a "Your Chevy VS my Ford" kind of personal choice. I also sell Red Vines and will never buy the other waxy plastic brand.

I agree about using tub containers. They are a lot easier to hold from the bottom as you butter (and shake) by layers. Also agree it looks better. The cost is not so horrible that you can't fold it into your prices.

As for the overall product, you get into trouble when you start cheaping out on how much oil you use. The corn loses flavor and tastes chalky and dry, IMO.

Butter is another personal decision. I like it but I don't use it. I use the "Fake Crap", to coin a phrase from one of our esteemed members here... mainly because it tastes comparable to what people expect in mainstream houses, and it doesn't soak into the corn. O'Dell's Butterfat is a super-great product, merging true butter-flavor with longer shelf life and no separation. Unfortunately, it's expensive as Hell and doesn't necessarily result in enough additional sales to justify its (much) higher cost... at least, not in my experience.

I've known a number of people who cling to their failing antique poppers, convinced it's the machine that produces the wonderful flavor at their specific location. If that was really true, I suspect I'd find a machine that hadn't been cleaned in so long the carbon build-up was probably introducing plenty of "personality" into the corn.

If you clean your machine daily, or at least a couple times a week, you can probably move to a high-efficiency popper, made by a company that's still around to support it, without much worry about losing individual quality. Our staff cleans daily. One of our poppers is on its second kettle (in 42 years). Our other one is a more-recent model. Between them, there is no difference in quality or flavor that I can discern.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The best popcorn is popped by hand, in real butter. The problem with popping in butter is that you need to do it by hand, because you closely need to regulate the temperature, or otherwise the butter will burn. That's why putting regular butter in a popcorn kettle is a bad idea. A good, but expensive alternative is clarified butter, which is just regular butter with the potential burning fractions taken out of it.

[Darin Steffl]

Where do you get the Funtastic coconut oil? We order from Vistar and they said they can't sell us the Funastic oil because it's exclusive to AMC. This is weird because they'll sell us the Funtastic topping.

When the fake topping is $60-70 per box but the butter stuff is $170 or more per 35 lb box, I don't think we'll see our return on the extra cost. That seems horribly expensive to buy real butter. We're certainly not going to melt stuff from a grocery store either.

[Frank Cox]

I'm willing to try new things in order to offer great tasting popcorn.

I don't think we'll see our return on the extra cost. That seems horribly expensive to buy real butter.

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[Darin Steffl]

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Our popcorn already tastes great. It's my favorite of all the theaters I've been to. So trying new things is something I can do but not at a 200-300% increase in cost. Changing kernels or oils to something with 25% higher cost is much more reasonable. I don't think a 3x increase in cost for real butter topping is going to be worth the cost.

People say Odell's Supurkist provides as close to a real butter taste as possible without the cost. It's $70 vs $180 for real butter.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Our popcorn already tastes great. It's my favorite of all the theaters I've been to. So trying new things is something I can do but not at a 200-300% increase in cost. Changing kernels or oils to something with 25% higher cost is much more reasonable. I don't think a 3x increase in cost for real butter topping is going to be worth the cost.

People say Odell's Supurkist provides as close to a real butter taste as possible without the cost. It's $70 vs $180 for real butter.

If you ask the question of how to make "The Best Popcorn", don't be surprised to get the answer to your question. From your replies to your own question I think you asked your question wrong: You're not looking to make the BEST popcorn, you're just looking at options to increase the quality of your popcorn.

[Frank Cox]

I see that some of my customers posted a photo of themselves at last night's show.

With their buttered popcorn.

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[Scott Norwood]

I'm not an expert on popcorn, but I am a fan of it as a snack food.

The best movie popcorn seems to consist of the following: Weaver Gold Hybrid corn, coconut oil, and Better Buttery Flavacol. Corn to oil ratio should be 3:1. Better Buttery Flavacol actually is better and more buttery than regular Flavacol. The amount of Flavacol should be adjusted to taste--my personal feeling is that the recommendations on the box call for slightly too much Flavacol. I don't have an opinion on the brand of oil, but it needs to be coconut oil.

Half of the theatre owners I know swear by Cretors poppers and the other half swear by Gold Medal. I can't tell the difference in the corn based upon the machine in which it was popped.

Popcorn should be kept warm before serving, either in a popper with a heat lamp or in a warming cabinet. As it sits, it gets crispier. It is actually kind of soggy if eaten straight out of the machine.

Agreed with O'Dells butter topping (the real stuff, not the fake stuff). it's just clarified butter, which you can make yourself--the water and milk solids are removed, which increases the shelf life and makes the popcorn less soggy.

Also agreed on buckets vs. bags. Buckets make less noise and are less likely to leak butter onto patrons' clothes. The tall, rectangular red-and-white "POPCORN" boxes are OK, too, but they don't hold butter.

[Jack Ondracek]

Where do you get the Funtastic coconut oil? We order from Vistar and they said they can't sell us the Funastic oil because it's exclusive to AMC. This is weird because they'll sell us the Funtastic topping.

We also used to get it from Vistar, but the supply dried up last year during the height of the pandemic.. They haven't used the "AMC exclusive" on me. They just say it isn't available. I tend to shrug when they come up with those excuses because their reasoning for not having basic theatre staples tends to vary with the time of day and who you're asking.

It hasn't escaped notice that a 35lb bag of seed now costs what 50lbs used to. Again... odd reasoning. They started by saying the 35lb bags were easier for the kids to handle. Fine... but suspiciously, the price per pound went up at about the same time as the bag size went down.

[Mike Blakesley]

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating in this thread.

We used Odell's Butterfat (real butter) for many years. I hated the cost of it, but hey, we wanted to serve real butter.

Then one year at a convention, a sales rep for our concession dealer gave me a case of Odell's "SupurKist 2" (imitation butter) to try out. I took it home and we switched it out for the real stuff, and told no one about it except the concession crew.

Within a few days I had several comments from people saying "Did you do something to the popcorn? It tastes even better than usual!" And, to date I have had absolutely zero complaints. We've been using the SupurKist 2 for probably 20 or 25 years, at least.

We use Orville Redenbacher corn, we pop in Odell's coconut oil, and we put in about two tablespoons of Flavacol into each batch while popping. We have regular salt and Flavacol on the counter, and some people (kids and teens, mostly) will absolutely cover the top of their popcorn with that Flavacol. We used to have a Manley machine but we got a Cretors in 1996.

I constantly hear from people who are here visiting, and they say that they've had popcorn at theaters where they live, but ours is the best -- one guy swears that ours is the "best on the planet" -- so I think I'll not make any changes at this point. I have to admit, I do wish we could put up a sign saying "real butter." But nobody ever asks anyway!

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't have any experience with "Supur-Kist 2". A lot of the fake butter products do taste more like butter than the real thing, but what I often find missing is the "umami component", the "full" taste you get with real butter, which can't be easily described.

IPopcorn should be kept warm before serving, either in a popper with a heat lamp or in a warming cabinet. As it sits, it gets crispier. It is actually kind of soggy if eaten straight out of the machine.

This is a pretty important point often forgotten. People think that the fresh stuff is the best, but popcorn that has been "aged" in a warming cabinet for an hour or so will actually taste better.

[Mark Lane]

We use Sunflower Seed Oil.
I hate our butter topping but our customers love it so I am not changing it. We layer the butter topping. Three of four layers. We also allow people to bring in their own reusable buckets to save a dollar. People bring in buckets from other theaters, from post showings, and even ice cream buckets. It saves us the cost of the disposable popcorn tub and we pass that on to the customer.
We keep our prices low ($3.00) for a large, this results in most customers purchasing popcorn.. and we sell a lot of to-go orders. We don't give free refills, we charge .50¢ which is enough to reduce the number of people who just take a refill because it is free. The small price doesn't discourage people who want a refill but discourages people who take it just because it is free.