People · 2026-08-26

Angie Bastian

Started a kettle in a Mankato, Minnesota, garage in 2001 with her husband Dan, as a college fund the children could watch being earned.
Moved that kettle corn from festivals and Vikings crowds into grocery in 2004: three Lunds stores and a St. Peter co-op, then Target and Costco.
Renamed the brand BOOMCHICKAPOP in 2012, took Sherbrooke and then TPG money, and sold Angie's Artisan Treats to Conagra Brands for $250 million in cash, closed 23 October 2017.

Angie and Dan Bastian bought an outdoor kettle in 2001 and started popping in their garage in Mankato, Minnesota. She was a psychiatric nurse practitioner. He taught junior high Spanish. Their children were three and five, and the point was a college fund the children could see being earned. Sixteen years later Conagra Brands paid $250 million in cash for the company that kettle became.

The industrial change is the aisle, not the crop. Grocery already carried unpopped jars, microwave bags, and flavored ready-to-eat corn. What the Bastians documented, with dates and a price, is the clean founder trail of the twenty-first-century natural ready-to-eat wave: whole grain, gluten-free, non-GMO on the label, sold as a bag you open rather than a crop you pop. This atlas scores that bag 3.9 and seats it at number 10.

A nurse, a teacher, a kettle

Angie (Miller) Bastian graduated from Goshen College with a B.S.N. and from Emory University with a master's in nursing. The Women Business Collaborative page, a 2025 Minnesota State University, Mankato, speaker page, and a 2026 Confidence Summit bio all say she worked 28 years and retired as a psychiatric nurse practitioner in 2011, a decade into the popcorn business.

The Mankato page is the only retrieved source that gives Dan a working life of his own. He graduated from St. John's University with a B.A. in history, taught in Benque Viejo, Belize, taught English as a second language in Merida, Mexico, then taught high school and coached in New Mexico and Mankato. "It was his idea to start a kettle corn company." He left teaching for the business in 2004.

Angie told Jennifer Chen, at Brit + Co on 12 June 2018, how the decision arrived. "Seventeen years ago, my husband Dan and I had a little freak-out parent moment when we realized we hadn't started a college fund for our children." They wanted work the children could watch. "We bought a big outdoor kettle and began to pop kettle corn in our garage and sold it locally." A Minnetonka Public Schools speaker bio says they bought the kettle online. Conagra's 2017 close release gives the corporate version of the same start: a garage in Mankato in 2001, "as a means of teaching their children the value of hard work and creating a college fund for them," and "a snack they felt good about feeding them."

That is a kettle, a garage, and a school calendar. It is not a farm, and the couple has never claimed one.

Festivals, 120 bags, four stores

Brit + Co dates the first break to 2002, selling outside the Minnesota Vikings stadium. Burl Gilyard, in Twin Cities Business of 1 January 2018, gives the first three years as amateur baseball games and high school athletic events, then a package of 120 bags sent to the Vikings, whose training camp had long sat in Mankato. That produced a sponsorship, and the sponsorship produced a path to retailers. Kavita Kumar's Star Tribune profile tells the same 120-bag story as scrappy outreach to the training facility. Speaker copy that calls the brand "the official kettle corn of the NFL's Minnesota Vikings" is downstream of that arrangement; the documented mechanism is 120 bags.

Kumar also printed the goal they did not get. In the early years Angie wanted a Minnesota State Fair booth, and the fair turned her down. "If we would have gotten into the Minnesota State Fair, we would have thought that we had made it," she told a Twin Cities Startup Week room. "But if we stuck with that goal and said, OK, we just failed, where would we be?" The rejection pushed them toward stores.

Gilyard dates the first grocery placement to 2004: Angie's Kettle Corn in four stores, three metro Lunds & Byerlys and a co-op in St. Peter. Kumar: "In 2004, food co-ops around the Twin Cities and Lund's began carrying their products, then called Angie's Kettle Corn, in a handful of stores. Then they got picked up by big-box chains such as Target and Costco." Brit + Co compresses the same year. The name on the 2004 shelf was still Angie's Kettle Corn.

What the bag sold, besides sugar and salt, was convenience and a label. It was already popped. Angie told the Startup Week room that "it was the first branded non-GMO popcorn on the market." That is her sentence and a label claim. Commercial popcorn in the United States is conventionally bred and is not a genetically modified crop, so the claim mattered in stores rather than in a field.

They printed Dan's cell number on the packages. Shoppers in Costco and Target called to ask whether the corn was gluten free. "It was confusing at first," she told Kumar, "because popcorn is naturally gluten free." They pursued gluten-free certification anyway. "We said if it's important to people, then it's important to us." An early investor, around 2011, told them to take the personal number off the bag. That is a garage product turning into a packaged-goods item.

Gilyard dates the first national sales director, Jim Lee, out of Land O'Lakes, to 2009. Headcounts move with the year: about 150 employees and dual headquarters in North Mankato and Minneapolis when TPG took its 2014 stake, per Kristen Leigh Painter in the Star Tribune; 240 employees, about 200 of them in Minnesota, in the Mankato Free Press of 3 October 2014; "over 200 people" in the school speaker PDF. Print the dated numbers.

The name she sells as a decision

The rename from Angie's Kettle Corn to BOOMCHICKAPOP is not retroactive company copy. It is the talk she is paid to give.

Leading Authorities puts the act in her speaker header: she "spearheaded the company's rebrand from 'Angie's Kettle Corn' to 'Boomchickapop.'" Conagra's 2017 close release dates it: "rebranded from Angie's to Angie's BOOMCHICKAPOP in 2012." Gilyard uses the same year.

Tim Krohn caught her in her own words in the Mankato Free Press of 3 October 2014, before Conagra and while TPG was arriving. The company had "a bit of an identity problem as it shifted from the surgary kettle corn popcorn to the healthy popcorn market." She said: "We were looking at the health food market and knew we had to launch a simple product with quality ingredients that tasted good. We knew we couldn't just call it Angie's Kettle Corn anymore." They hired a branding firm. They wanted a name that stayed feminine and stayed off diet language. "We didn't want it to be something where you're telling people they need this to diet or anything." The firm came back with Boomchickapop. "It was perfect, fun," she said. Within months the new name outsold the rest of the line, and they moved everything under it.

Gilyard has the retail test. "Target was key; they let us test it," she said. "They loved the brand and they loved the design." She told him sales went from $11 million to $80 million a year during Sherbrooke Capital's tenure. Those are founder-reported figures given to a business monthly after the sale, not audited statements.

The regret is hers too. A woman at Startup Week asked what it meant to put her own name on a brand. "Oh my goodness, yes," she told Kumar. "Had I known, I would have never put my name on the package because technically Conagra owns my name now. A lot of founders don't think about that." She negotiated to keep her story. "It still feels like it's our baby, even though it's not our baby (anymore). It feels like we've created something that now has a life of its own, sort of like a child in a way, and it went off to a really good college."

The second half is founder talk. The first half is the record. The name on the bag was an asset, and she sold it.

Minority, majority, cash

Private-equity dates only conflict if you flatten the firms into one transaction.

Gilyard, Krohn in 2014, and the Mankato Free Press of 6 July 2018 agree that Sherbrooke Capital took a minority stake in 2011. Baking Business, 1 October 2014, reported that TPG Growth, of Fort Worth, acquired a stake in Angie's Artisan Treats from Sherbrooke, terms undisclosed. John Giannuzzi of Sherbrooke said his firm had partnered with the company "over the past four years." Dan Bastian, that week: "They were really great in helping us grow." And: "It's business as usual. We'll still help grow the company."

Gilyard and Painter both call the 2014 TPG position a majority or controlling stake. Angie, after that close: "we were no longer in charge, but we still had influence." She credited TPG with sales, distribution, and a deeper executive bench.

On 22 September 2017 Conagra announced a definitive agreement to buy Angie's Artisan Treats from TPG Growth. The release TPG hosts did not disclose a price. Sean Connolly, then Conagra's president and chief executive, called the brand "a leader in the fast-growing, better-for-you snacking segment." Mark Zurcher, then chief executive of Angie's Artisan Treats, said the business was "still in the early innings." Angie, in the same release: "It was a dream of my husband Dan and I to create positive energy when we started our little popcorn company in our Minnesota garage."

Painter reported that Friday that the company would not make Dan or Angie available and issued a statement instead. "Fans can expect us to continue to be a brand dedicated to snacks that you can feel good about feeding your family," Angie said. "We often hear from our fans that they wish they could find more of our flavors in more stores. Being part of Conagra will allow us to do just that." Conagra already owned Orville Redenbacher's jar. This purchase was the ready-to-eat bag.

PR Newswire carried the close on 23 October 2017: Conagra completed the acquisition "for $250 million." The founders "will continue to actively support the business as part of Conagra Brands." The brand then had more than a dozen ready-to-eat varieties and sold in natural, grocery, club, drug, and mass channels in the United States, Canada, South Korea, Peru, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Kumar later printed the form of the payment: "In 2017, the couple sold the company, Angie's Artisan Treats, to packaged goods giant Conagra Brands for $250 million in cash." September is the announcement. October 23 is the close.

Kumar also recorded what the sale did inside the plant. The Bastians had set up an employee equity pool. In the days before the close, on two occasions, they sat employees down and showed them the number. People cried, including, she said, "an otherwise stoic Marine in the technology department." "So bring your people along," she told the Startup Week room. "Find a way. Fine, tell them they're awesome. But give them some money. Because it matters."

After the bag

Gilyard, in January 2018: the Bastians held no ownership stake, were no longer employees, and "continue to serve as consultants." Krohn, on 6 July 2018: Conagra spokeswoman Lanie Friedman said Angie "remains a consultant and 'brand ambassador' for Boomchickapop" while the Minneapolis Loring Park office, 50 to 60 people at its peak, emptied toward Chicago and Omaha. The North Mankato plant, Friedman said, would keep popping. Kumar, in 2019: "She continues to be a consultant and brand ambassador."

The 2026 pages use different words: speaker, adviser, investor. The Confidence Summit page for 7 August 2026 says she "advises, invests, and speaks nationally with Leading Authorities, and recently completed her tenure as board chair of Prospera Foods, a Benefit Corporation." Women Business Collaborative and the 2025 Mankato page still call her the current board chair. This record prints the conflict rather than an invented end date.

Speaker copy repeats the same honors in the same order: Connect Business Magazine 2012 Person of the Year, shared with Dan; a Minnesota women's business hall of fame; United Nations Women's Entrepreneurship Day Pioneer in Food, 2017. They are listed here, not re-reported from the awarding bodies.

Brit + Co holds the domestic remainder. Dan's brother became chief financial officer. Dan's father helped deliver to local stores. The Atlas listing for the bag reads "Not a farm" and "Cheese lane is a buyer demand, not a kernel," which is the standing verdict on the whole natural snack-aisle wave. boomchickapop.com, retrieved in August 2026, is a Conagra product page.