My first “celebrity” interview was in September 1988, when I was assigned to meet Orville Redenbacher at the Porter County Airport. He flew in on a small private plane to be grand marshal at the 10th annual Popcorn Festival.
I was a freshman at Valparaiso University, and this assignment was for the campus newspaper, The Torch.
The Popcorn Festival is celebrating 40 years Saturday in Valparaiso.Redenbacher, the man with the bow tie who was a master of advertising, marketing and name recognition, no longer has that name recognition at the festival that launched in his honor.
Redenbacher died at age 88 in September 1995, and ConAgra, the parent company of his popcorn brand, continued to provide financial sponsorship for the event until 2014, prompting festival organizers to remove his name from the impressive parade of popcorn-constructed floats and other features such as the Orville Redenbacher Entertainment Tent.
At the 2018 festival, Chicagoland Popcorn, a brand of gourmet popcorn that launched in September 2014 and has stores in Merrillville and St. John, has the sponsor rights to the parade and other events.
ConAgra Foods closed the Orville Redenbacher factory in June 2000 after 30 years in Valparaiso. The flagship factory was the inspiration for the festival in 1979. A sister production facility in Rensselaer is still in operation.
Redenbacher’s business and brand motto was “do one thing and do it better than anyone else.”
Much like Colonel Harland Sanders, Redenbacher invested years of hard work before he found fame and fortune. He was 69 when Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn made its debut in supermarkets. Within the first few years, sales grossed $30million by 1978, prompting him to expand and sell the brand in 1979 to Hunt-Wesson and Beatrice Corp. That move pushed sales past $1 billion. Redenbacher remained the commercial spokesman.
In my interviews, Redenbacher said his name, reputation and marketing ingenuity led to the success of his brand. At the brand’s launch, he said his last name was unknown and unpronounceable. He said he decided to use what he described as “free national television exposure” to introduce himself and his popcorn.
In 1973, he appeared with two impostors on the CBS game show “To Tell the Truth.” As the show’s host Garry Moore and celebrity panelists Bill Cullen, Kitty Carlisle, Peggy Cass and Joe Garagiola munched on large bowls of his “gourmet popping corn,” they tried to guess which of the three men was the real “Mr. Popcorn.” All four panelists guessed incorrectly, and Cass and Carlisle advised the real Redenbacher that “his name was too long for a product label.”
His brand name and legacy are strong and still incorporated by ConAgra. The latest series of commercials, especially created as internet commercials, now focus on the Orville Redenbacher brand popcorn farmers of Indiana, specifically Richard Overmyer, of Francesville, whose popcorn fields span Pulaski County.
“I’m proud to be a third-generation Orville Redenbacher’s farmer,” Overmyer says in the commercial, in which he’s shown harvesting popcorn with his granddaughter.
“In 1952, Orville hand-selected a small group of family farmers to grow his exclusive kernels. Today, my family still plants those special kernels that pop up lighter and fluffier than ordinary popcorn.”
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