People · 2026-08-26

Carl Hartman

Joined Chester, Inc. as plant breeder in 1959, introduced in Redenbacher's own 1975 book as "Carl Hartman from Iowa State, our plant breeder."
Bred the high-expansion Chester genotype sold from 1970 as Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn, with the breakthrough dated to 1965 by Farm Progress.
Ran crossing work at two nurseries, Valparaiso, Indiana, and Homestead, Florida, at about 9,000 cross pollinations and inbreeds a year.

The credit, in four printings

Robert W. Topping, in the acknowledgments of Just Call Me Orville, thanks "Carl Hartman, plant breeder for Chester, Inc., who developed the 'gourmet' hybrid that made Orville famous." That is the sharpest sentence in the file, and it comes from the authorized biography of the man whose face went on the label.

Three other pages print the same job. Redenbacher's 1975 Hunt-Wesson promotional book, Orville Redenbacher's Authorized and Complete Popcorn Lover's Guide, says: "we have a team including Carl Hartman from Iowa State, our plant breeder, who joined us in 1959, and we still try about 9,000 cross pollinations and inbreeds a year in our Valparaiso, Indiana nursery, and in our Homestead, Florida nursery." The same book calls him "a truly fine professional plant breeder." Kevin Fish, writing in Farm Progress on 6 January 2018, calls him "the company's breeding expert who was hired in 1959." Valparaiso Magazine, in Spring 2023, writing a chamber history of Chester, calls him a plant geneticist hired the same year. Topping and the 1975 book both say plant breeder, and that is the title this record uses.

The brand page runs shorter. orville.com's story timeline dates a 1965 perfection to Redenbacher and Charles F. Bowman, prints a 44:1 popped-to-unpopped ratio, and carries no breeder's name at all. Purdue's later alumni pages write the finding of "the winning product" as something "they" did at Chester. Encyclopedia.com, which this atlas rejects on the partnership date, at least sets "Carl Hart-man" inside its 1959 sentence.

What the public record gives, and what it withholds

The file is professional, not personal. No retrieved page gives a birth date. Searches of Find a Grave for Carl Hartman in Indiana returned a search-index list of memorials, none of which any retrieved obituary, cemetery note, or company page connects to Chester, Valparaiso, or popping corn. No obituary and no death record turned up. This atlas publishes no birth date and no death date for him.

"From Iowa State" is Redenbacher's 1975 wording and nothing more. No commencement list, alumni note, or degree title retrieved for this essay matches a Carl Hartman to a Chester hire. The affiliation stands as the sentence a promotional book printed, which is a different thing from a diploma on file.

What can be stated is a place, a year, and a method: a Valparaiso nursery, a Homestead winter plot, 1959, and hand pollination at scale. Everything else in this life would have to be invented, and the atlas would rather run a short file than a fictional one.

The field he walked into

Hybrid popcorn in the belt is older than the hire. A 2020 Purdue food-science page names Bruce Ashman, who led the university's hybrid popcorn breeding program from the 1960s, and a 2021 Purdue page, quoting Jay Hulbert of Ag Alumni Seed, traces most commercial popcorn genetics to Ashman's work. Ag Alumni Seed, the public house, dates to 1938. Ashman also co-authored National Corn Handbook NCH-5. His program and Hartman's nursery are separate operations with separate purposes, one public and one private, and The hybrid and the belt maps how the two fit together.

Fish gives the farm chronology. Orville Redenbacher managed Princeton Farms from 1940 to 1951, started hybrid popcorn there in 1941 with Purdue's hybrids, and opened a winter nursery at Homestead, Florida, the same year. By 1946 Princeton had hybrids of its own. In 1943 the farm sold packaged popping corn under the Princeton Farm name, and the brand site and Encyclopedia.com later date supermarket popcorn to 1944. Both years are on the record.

In 1951 Redenbacher and Bowman bought the George F. Chester and Son seed-corn plant near Valparaiso and renamed it Chester Hybrids, per Indiana Humanities. The NWI Times dates the founding of Chester, Inc. to 1947 on its anniversary page, the 1975 book dates the partnership to 1952, and Encyclopedia.com compresses everything into a 1940 partnership that no other retrieved source supports. Valparaiso Magazine, citing the Porter County Public Library genealogy department, has George F. Chester selling fertilizers, insecticides, and accessories from 1937 to 1951 before the sale. This record uses 1951 for the plant and prints the other years as they were published.

The nursery, 1959 onward

Hartman joined Chester in 1959. Farm Progress and the 1975 book agree, and no retrieved source disputes the year.

The 1975 book describes the work in the first person, as if the man on the label held the pollen. The procedure is ordinary hand breeding at volume. Ear shoots on the mother plants are covered before the silks emerge. Tassels on the father plants are bagged so pollen can be collected and poured by hand. Every fertilized silk yields one kernel, which is why a season's output is counted in ears rather than in bushels. About 9,000 cross pollinations and inbreeds a year, split across two sites, is the figure the book gives.

The Homestead plot is why the calendar works. A Florida winter nursery buys a second, sometimes a third, generation each year, which halves the wall-clock time between a cross and a stable line. Topping's early chapters place a Valparaiso nursery and a Homestead plot at Chester in the partners' first year, before the hire. Hartman is the named breeder who then ran that two-season calendar for the six years that ended in the 1965 result.

1965 is a breeding date

Fish: Hartman "worked with Redenbacher to develop a new breed of popcorn. A breakthrough occurred in 1965." The 1975 book keeps the credit collective: "Working together we developed the genuinely superior popping corn I had been searching for since boyhood." Topping's acknowledgment is the version that names one breeder.

The two documents are doing different jobs, and both are useful. A promotional book written in the voice of the man on the jar collects the nursery into a company "we" and then into a personal "I," because that is what a label has to sell. A biography's acknowledgments page has no product to move, so it can list the people whose work the narrative rests on and give each a title. When those two documents disagree about who bred a hybrid, the acknowledgments page is the one with nothing to gain.

The partners took the result to market as Red-Bow, a blend of the two surnames, and the popcorn trade declined it. The 1975 book gives the reason without decoration: "the popcorn industry didn't want it, because it had to cost a bit more." Processors bought by weight and had no line item for expansion.

Five years separate the breeding result from the grocery label, and the delay is a pricing problem rather than a genetics problem. A seed house sells to growers, and growers sell to processors who set a price per hundredweight. A kernel that costs more to grow needs a buyer who can charge for the difference, and in 1965 no processor in that chain wanted the job. The genotype sat inside Chester, Inc. through the back half of the decade while the partners looked for a channel that would pay for expansion.

Two cross counts circulate, and both are printed here. The Los Angeles Times obituary of 20 September 1995 says Redenbacher tried "about 30,000 corn hybrids," a number brand copy has carried since. Valparaiso Magazine has the partners trying "tens of thousands of hybrid strains before hiring" Hartman. The 1975 book, written while the nursery was still running, claims about 9,000 crosses and inbreeds a year across two sites. The expansion figures split the same way: 44:1 on the brand page as a company figure, "40 times or more" in the 1975 book against usual popcorns at about 30.

1970 is a brand date

In 1970 the partners paid the Chicago agency Gerson, Howe and Johnson $13,000 for the name and the face, and the corn became Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn. Wikipedia, citing the Vidette-Messenger of Porter County for 18 February 1970, dates the retail launch of the 30-ounce jar, tagged "World's most expensive popping corn," to February 1970; this essay did not retrieve that paper. Farm Progress and Purdue both treat 1970 as the named-product year, and Fish dates the first national push to March 1971 at Marshall Field's in Chicago. Valparaiso Magazine dates a Redbow launch to 1965 and calls Marshall Field's the partners' first big customer, which collapses two launches five years apart. This record follows Fish on the store date.

The jar itself is a moisture decision. The 1975 book rejects bags, boxes, and tins because they leak moisture once opened. Bruce Hamaker, at Purdue in 2020, put the working range at about 13 to 14.5 percent of kernel weight. NCH-5 puts maximum popping volume at 13.0 to 14.5 percent, with 13.5 percent optimum. A kernel bred for expansion delivers it only if the package holds that band from the plant to the pan.

What popping volume tests

Expansion is the industrial trait, and NCH-5 says so directly: "the most important factor influencing the economic value of popcorn is popping volume," measured as the volume of popped flakes from a given weight of kernels. Processors may reject a lot that misses a specified minimum. Bruised kernels pop smaller, which makes harvest method part of the genotype's commercial result. Combine harvesting is cheaper and rougher; ear harvest is slower and cleaner.

The 1975 book describes the bench that protected the number: special ear-harvest equipment, drying bins taken to about 15 percent, a sheller that rubs ears against each other instead of against metal burrs, a gravity separator, and a polisher. NCH-5 lists why the belt left open-pollinated varieties behind, naming yield, standing ability, "better popping expansion and more uniform kernel type and maturity," and notes that some hybrids are made dent-sterile so seed fields stay clean. That handbook is public science for growers and processors. The Chester cross was private, and its selling point was a claim a customer could test at home.

After the jar

Indiana Humanities: "Within a few short years, Orville Redenbacher popcorn had captured one-third of the market of unpopped popcorn." That mid-1970s grocery share belongs to a genotype, a face, and a company president together, in an aisle Cloid H. Smith had been supplying since 1914.

Distribution then left Valparaiso. Fish: in late 1971 Chester and Blue Plate Foods, a New Orleans subsidiary of Hunt-Wesson, agreed that Blue Plate would take distribution, and in 1976 Chester sold the popcorn operation to Hunt-Wesson. FundingUniverse's reprint of the International Directory of Company Histories and Indiana Humanities both use 1976; the Los Angeles Times later printed 1978 and a reported $2 million, which this record does not adopt. The International Directory dates Hunt-Wesson's microwave work to 1980 and a 1983 introduction of Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popping Corn as the first shelf-stable microwave popcorn, a claim that runs against the October 1984 introduction of Act II by James D. Watkins. The brand then passed through Norton Simon, Esmark, Beatrice, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and, in 1990, ConAgra.

The nursery went a different way. Valparaiso Magazine dates Cargill's purchase of Chester's hybrid seed-corn department to 1967 and the close of the popcorn factory to 1999. No retrieved page follows Hartman into a Hunt-Wesson laboratory, into retirement, or anywhere else after the sale.

Purdue University Press published Topping's biography in 2011. The acknowledgments name him plant breeder for Chester, Inc., who developed the gourmet hybrid that made Orville famous.