Our First Day!
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006Ok, so we had to start somewhere, so here it is. Springfield farmers market, Springfield, MA – June 14th, 2006. How did we get into the kettle corn biz yer wonderin’..right? A few years back Velma and I had gone to a craft show in Sudbury, MA. There was a tent called “Grandpa’s Kettle Corn” selling the stuff and we went apeshit over it. We would come back year after year to buy a couple of bags. Of course we had tried in vain to make the stuff ourselves with no luck. We always noticed that the kettle corn tent had a line of people, waiting. I ran the numbers in my head and thought “I’d like to do that! It’s a portable biz too!” (Velma and I had always wanted to travel around the country in an RV. Why not sell kettle corn to support ourselves? That was the dream/delusion anyways.)
I ended up buying a kettle from somebody on ebay around 2005. Slowly started to pop a few test batches to see how I’d do. (Terrible. It’s actually more trickier than it looks!) I Gave loads of it away to my co-workers at my corporate video editing job. THEY started to go nuts over the stuff and demanded that I bring my “tests” more often.
Steve worked there as a video producer. The stuff got to him while munching on a bag when he was driving home one day. I told HIM about the numbers and showed him how “easy” it was to make. He mentioned that there was a farmers market down the street from him and we should give it a whirl. Why not?
We weren’t sure how people would respond to this stuff. I assumed anyone who went to a farmers market was a tree-hugging, earthy-crunchy vegetarian who went there for the organic produce. We sold about 50 bags that day. It was ok. Certainly didn’t make the same as my corporate job, but we had fun doing it and it paid for the beer and the meal afterwards.
Farmers markets usually charge about $15 to set up a tent. Craft shows usually want something around $200 to set up. At 15 bucks, how were we gonna lose?
