Popcorn Atlas

People · 2026-08-26

Charles Coristine

  • Bought LesserEvil in November 2011 for $250,000 out of savings, plus a later $100,000, per documents CNBC Make It reviewed, and took the chief executive chair full time in 2012.
  • Took the brand off co-packers and into its own plants: a 5,000-square-foot Danbury factory of used auction equipment, a coconut oil reformulation in 2014, Kroger in 2015, and by 2025 five Danbury plants, one in New Milford, and 5,000 pounds of popcorn an hour.
  • Sold the company to The Hershey Company: agreement announced 3 April 2025, close dated 18 November 2025 in Hershey's Form 10-K, which prints $756.1 million spent.

Charles Coristine bought LesserEvil in November 2011. He was a bond and fixed-income trader finishing a Cornell MBA and working at TD Bank, and the company he bought was losing money on less than $1 million in annual revenue. Megan Sauer and Lauren Shamo, writing for CNBC Make It on 26 April 2025, reviewed the documents: $250,000 from his savings, plus a later $100,000. He became full-time chief executive in 2012.

Fourteen years later the same brand had five plants in Danbury, Connecticut, one in New Milford, roughly 350 employees, and a signed agreement to sell to Hershey. That arc, a co-packed kettle-corn label turned into a vertically integrated manufacturer, is the reason this page exists. This atlas already scores the bag 4.3 and seats LesserEvil at number 04, with the deck "Organic grocery bag that still tastes like corn."

Most 2025 and 2026 lists of popcorn chief executives fail a biography test. Conagra's popcorn, Orville Redenbacher's and Act II and BOOMCHICKAPOP, sits inside Grocery and Snacks under Jill Dexter, who reports to John Brase. Hershey's SkinnyPop sits inside Salty Snacks under Veronica Villasenor, who reports to Kirk Tanner. Those people run portfolios. Coristine has run one popcorn-centered company for thirteen years and is still the named operator of it.

2004, Tuckahoe: the company he bought

LesserEvil started in 2004 in Tuckahoe, New York, a date stable across the 2012 Connecticut Post, Consumer Goods Technology in 2025, and Hershey's deal copy. Just Food, reporting the 2023 Aria round, wrote "set up in 2005," which reads as a later trade slip.

Who founded it is reported more than one way. Richard Lee, in the Connecticut Post of 28 March 2012, has the earliest retrieved newspaper account: "Founded by actor Gene Hackman and television stock picker Jim Cramer in Tuckahoe, N.Y., its mission was to create all-natural and healthy snacks. Its first product was the kettle corn." Rob Dube, interviewing Coristine for Forbes on 3 September 2019, put the same pair in the money seat, launching into the Atkins boom and "primarily funded by actor Gene Hackman and Mad Money's Jim Cramer." Consumer Goods Technology, reprinting Progressive Grocer around the Hershey announcement, names three: Michael Sands, Hackman, and Cramer. That is company origin as the trade reported it, and this record prints the conflict without inventing a cap table.

Lee, writing six months after the purchase, also named the sellers. Coristine, then 40, "bought the business last year from David West and David West Jr., and moved it to Wilton." "The Wests did a nice job stopping the hemorrhaging. They ran it from Greenwich," he told Lee. CNBC, thirteen years later, does not name the Wests; it has him meeting "an owner" of a "flatlining" business at a barbecue. Dube has a friend telling him about owners "desperate to sell." All three tellings agree the company was failing.

Lee is also useful on the 2012 bag, before Danbury. Classic Kettlecorn, co-packed in Topeka, Indiana, won the gluten-free category at the Connecticut Specialty Food Association that March. Krinkle Sticks and Veggie Sticks were in the line. Some Balducci's, Whole Foods, and ShopRite stores carried it. Coristine, then a Larchmont resident with what Lee counted as 17 years as a bond and fixed-income trader, said the business had had "disappointing financial results." "I didn't get out of Wall Street to make tens of millions. I came here to make something good." That is a 2012 quote, not a 2025 deal memoir.

November 2011, then a factory

CNBC is the price document: November 2011, $250,000 from savings, plus a future $100,000, "according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It." The company was losing money on less than $1 million in annual revenue, by its own estimate, and Coristine had "no food industry experience."

His trading years are reported with different arithmetic. Dube names Morgan Stanley and TD Ameritrade and "18 years" at major corporations. Lee counted 17 years as a trader. CNBC says he "used to revel in working at Morgan Stanley" and woke in the night to trade Tokyo and London. Ages scatter the same way. Lee has him at 40 in March 2012. CNBC calls him 52 on 26 April 2025. Rob Ryser, in the News-Times of 11 April 2025, quotes him saying, "I'm 53, so in two-and-a-half years I'm going to be 55." Print the dated ages and leave the birthday alone.

In 2012 he finished the Cornell degree and took the chief-executive title full time. CNBC: he hired his graduate-school friend Andrew Strife as chief operating officer and chief financial officer, and his wakeboard instructor as head of marketing. They worked from Wilton. Co-packers were taking about 20 percent of revenue on each sale. Savings ran out, so they raised an undisclosed friends-and-family amount plus bank financing, moved into a 5,000-square-foot factory in Danbury, and filled it with used auction equipment. Strife told CNBC they made "friends with welders down the street," painted the building black, and put a yellow logo on it themselves. Drivers asked whether it was a strip club.

Ryser, walking Eagle Road in April 2025, has Coristine putting the first kernel in the basement of a Finance Drive building: "I needed a rebirth, and Danbury is where that came." The industrial fact is the move. Tuckahoe, then Greenwich and Wilton, then Danbury, where the company still pops.

Dube has the first-year damage report. "I inherited a business that was worse than anticipated." Within the first year several top chain partners pulled out, which he told Dube cost about 60 percent of sales. He dumped lines that were not selling and bought space to test recipes. A co-packed, money-losing kettle brand had to become a manufacturer.

Coconut oil, Kroger, a salary

In 2014 a neighboring carpet factory moved out. LesserEvil knocked down the wall and added 2,000 square feet. That year Coristine's nutritionist suggested coconut oil. He shelf-tested it on top of a hot refrigerator for three months, the oil stayed fresh, and he liked the buttery taste. The reformulated popcorn launched with a laughing Buddha logo as the Buddha Bowl. The company told CNBC it brought in roughly $2 million that year, about a third of annual revenue.

Kroger, "the first major retailer to sell LesserEvil," started stocking in 2015, which funded a 2017 move to a 20,000-square-foot factory. In 2018 the company took its first outside money, about $3 million from InvestEco, added lines, and rebranded each product as a "guru," Homer to Thoreau. CNBC says the rebrand and the added products pushed the brand into profitability. Coristine started paying himself a salary that year.

Just Food, on 21 September 2023, carried the next money sentence: LesserEvil sold a "significant minority" to Aria Growth Partners, stake size and dollars undisclosed, with Valor Equity, InvestEco, and Touch Capital as secondary participants. Coristine, quoted there: "Our ability to self-manufacture gives us tremendous upside." The brand was already in Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, with plants in New Milford and Danbury. CNBC later printed a company figure for that round: $19 million, used to buy out prior investors and open New Milford.

CNBC's 2023 figures have a shape: $103.3 million gross, $82.9 million net, $14.4 million EBITDA, then $62 million net in the first half of 2024. Consumer Goods Technology, around the Hershey announcement, said 2024 revenue "reportedly hit $165 million." That is a trade "reportedly," and it sits beside the company figures rather than on top of them.

Capacity, from CNBC and Ryser: 5,000 pounds of popcorn an hour. CNBC counts 350 employees in 2025. Ryser counts more than 300 people, five plants in Danbury, one in New Milford, and a newly leased 300,000-square-foot warehouse in Southeast, New York. "The fact that I just signed that lease in the last six months shows that we are not going anywhere for at least five to 10 years," Coristine told Hearst. "(Hershey) is excited that we have vertical integration. There's not a lot of popcorn companies that do."

The live company homepage, retrieved in August 2026, lists USDA Organic, non-GMO, kosher, organic virgin coconut oil, and avocado oil. The official where-to-buy page names Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Kroger, Publix, and Sprouts, plus Target.com, Walmart.com, ThriveMarket.com, and Amazon.com. Costco SKUs appear on third-party trackers and not on that page, so they stay off this record.

The Atlas review of the bag names Himalayan Gold as organic corn, extra-virgin olive oil, and Himalayan salt, and prints the verdict plainly: "The salt color is marketing. The bag is not." It scores high among national ready-to-eat brands and still below the farm-kernel work, which is where a grocery bag lands on this list no matter who owns it. The company homepage lists organic virgin coconut oil and avocado oil; CNBC dates the coconut reformulation to 2014. Those are separate products across a decade, not one formula.

CNBC also printed a 2024 quality episode. A Consumer Reports investigation, it said, found "concerning amounts of lead" in two cassava-based Lil' Puffs snacks for children. The company issued an apology and relaunched on sorghum. The Consumer Reports text was not retrieved here; this is CNBC's account.

April 2025, then the 10-K

Hershey's 3 April 2025 release is the agreement. Michele Buck, then president and chief executive, called LesserEvil "a multi-category, better-for-you snacks platform" that would bring "additional manufacturing capabilities and capacity." Hershey already owned SkinnyPop, Dot's Homestyle Pretzels, and Pirate's Booty. The release said LesserEvil's leadership team would continue, and Coristine, quoted as chief executive, called Hershey a "true cultural home." Buck's sentence is the industrial one: capacity, inside a salty portfolio that already held one popcorn brand.

Hershey did not print a price. Christopher Doering, in Food Dive that day, wrote that the Wall Street Journal, "which first reported the deal, said it was roughly $750 million." CNBC added on 26 April: "plus more if LesserEvil hits some performance milestones, according to the Wall Street Journal." A spokesperson told CNBC that Coristine would remain chief executive. Ryser, on 11 April, had him in his own words: "I am going to continue to run the company for the next two-and-a-half years at least." The deal included performance incentives. "I negotiated some ... freedom. I can see myself playing a senior role at Hershey for awhile." Danbury staying put, he said, was "a non-negotiable."

The close has two dates. Hershey's 19 November 2025 release says "The Hershey Company has closed its acquisition of LesserEvil," quotes Kirk Tanner as the Hershey voice, quotes Coristine again as chief executive, misspells him "Charles Cortistine," and says the leadership team "will remain with the company." No price.

Doering interviewed Villasenor at the close. Hershey still disclosed no price. She called it "a very strategic acquisition" and said Hershey would "listen and learn from the experts" before changing plans, as it had with Dot's. Salty snacks were about 10 percent of Hershey's $11.2 billion in 2024 revenue, and Hershey wants 20 percent within a decade. That is the snack-aisle logic this atlas has been tracking since the cheddar bag.

Ryser also asked about the next chapter. Coristine mentioned teaching entrepreneurship in high school, then taking time off. He is the father of two teenagers.

Hershey's Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025 is the filing this page uses for the numbers: "On November 18, 2025, we completed the acquisition of LesserEvil, LLC." The cash-flow line reads, "In 2025, we spent $756.1 million to acquire LesserEvil." Note 2, in thousands, prints initial cash consideration of $769,090, that is $769.090 million, funded from cash on hand and short-term borrowings, plus contingent consideration from zero to a maximum of $200,000 thousand, that is $200 million, "if certain defined earnings targets are met over a multi-year period." The auditor's report states consideration of $815.2 million.

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