Final day of the season!
Friday, November 7th, 2008
We got rained out on our last day of the season at Springfield. There must’ve been a bunch of sad faces down there – but hey, the mortal enemy of fluffy, dry kettle corn are buckets of water pouring constantly on to the operation.
Guess what was the busiest day of the season at the Framingham Farmers market? Yup, it was this last day! We popped more on our final day than any other day during the entire year. People were loading up. Not sure how you would get a couple of bags to last 6 months.
We’ve now been popping here for 2 years, and it’s following the same pattern we discovered at the Springfield Farmers Market. The crowd slowly builds and becomes loyal customers. It doesn’t become lucrative until after the 2nd year.
We’ll continue to pop at home and will be selling the stuff online at least until January. We had a pretty good run last year before Christmas for online orders as presents. We’ve got to explain to our customers that the stuff doesn’t keep too long, so ordering early and leaving it under a tree is not the best way to spread kettle corn joy.
Steve has potentially lined up one last popping gig at his teaching job in November. We’ll see if it happens and you’ll get to see what went down here at this blog.
I’ve also been getting a bunch of email from people who are interested in getting into the kettle corn biz and want free advice from me. I’ve been thinking of doing a complete “inside scoop on the kettle corn biz” manual. How much does it cost to set up, what’s the profit margin, etc. Somebody did a crappy .pdf like this and sold it on ebay a while ago. It was the only thing I could find before I got started in all this. It would be something that would lay it all out for you if you’re considering getting into the biz.
Next adventure: we’re going to Hawaii for the entire month of February. We’ll be checking out the farmers markets and see who’s making kettle corn out there. I found somebody online who was doing it on Oahu. I’ll be doing another blog post here on where we’re staying and what will be happening.
