Popcorn Atlas

People · 2026-08-26

Gladys Otto Garrett

  • Opened at 10 West Madison Street in Chicago in 1949 and made the shop itself the product: brass kettles cooking in view of the sidewalk, small batches, hand scooping, a line.
  • Sold CaramelCrisp and CheeseCorn for five cents a bag, the two coats the company still cooks and the two halves of the bag Chicago carries home in a tin.
  • Left a business the family ran for twenty-three years after her death in 1982, through her daughter Joan Zeisler and granddaughter Karen Galaba, until the 2005 sale to Megan and Lance Chody.

Gladys Otto Garrett started selling popcorn at 10 West Madison Street in Chicago in 1949. The company dates the shop identity to 1952. What she put on that corner was retail theater. Brass kettles worked where the sidewalk could see them. Corn came out in small batches, hand scooped, weighed into a bag. CaramelCrisp, CheeseCorn, Buttery, and Plain sold for five cents a bag alongside fudge and nuts.

Chicago already knew popcorn two other ways. Charles Cretors had put a steam-driven popper on a street wagon in 1885 and taken the machine to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Frederick and Louis Rueckheim had boxed a dry molasses coat on popcorn and peanuts and put the Cracker Jack name on it in 1896. The Madison Street corner was a third thing: a shop whose product was the kettle in the window and the smell on the block.

The company's own about page names the founder Gladys Otto. Later coverage, including the Chicago Sun-Times of 18 September 2024 and the company's 75th-year remarks to a Scholastic reporter, uses Gladys Otto Garrett. This essay uses the later form because the family name is on the door.

A thin file

Birth year is not in the sources this atlas retrieved. It is not on the company about page, not in the 2024 Sun-Times anniversary, not in Time Out, and not in her daughter's obituary. Pre-1949 life is a family kitchen story, not a vital record.

The Sun-Times, interviewing Megan Chody for the 75th year, holds the shortest reliable sketch. "Gladys Otto Garrett started in her Milwaukee kitchen before testing the waters at Madison and State Street in Chicago, where the corn was made in brass kettles (it's still made that way). Back then, a bag of CheeseCorn or CaramelCrisp cost a nickel. Gladys Garrett died in 1982." Maggie Hennessy, in Time Out Chicago of 12 September 2019, adds a Milwaukee family competition "to see who could make the tastiest caramel corn," then a Loop opening "on Madison and State."

A 1931 Milwaukee start circulates inside the family line. Print it as family telling, not as a second founding year. On 30 April 2003 the Chicago Tribune quoted Karen Galaba, then president and a granddaughter of "the founding Mrs. Garrett." "The family-owned and-operated venture started in Milwaukee in 1931." Galaba: "My grandmother came up with our secret CaramelCrisp recipe at her kitchen table with the help of her brothers and cousins." She grew up eating CaramelCrisp as breakfast cereal. Pressed for numbers, and for her grandmother's first name, she gave neither.

Maureen O'Donnell's Sun-Times obituary of Joan C. Zeisler, 20 December 2018, is the other family document. Joan, retired chief executive and president, died 14 December 2018 at 84. O'Donnell wrote that the company "started in Milwaukee in 1931" and "opened in Chicago in 1949 at State and Madison." Joan "started working the counter at Garrett Popcorn, the family business, when she was only 6 or 7." Karen Zeisler, Joan's daughter and a former chief operating officer, said her grandmother Gladys "was a creator of the family popcorn recipes, originally cheese, butter and trademarked CaramelCrisp, in their hometown of Milwaukee." Karen's other line: "My grandmother had a sweet tooth."

Joan was born in Urbana, grew up in Milwaukee, graduated from New Trier in 1952, and married Karl Zeisler in Wilmette in 1954. If she was 84 in 2018 she was born about 1934, which puts a six-year-old at a counter around 1940, nine years before the Chicago date. The arithmetic is the paper's. It points at a Milwaukee kitchen, not a Milwaukee address this record retrieved.

1949, then a shop

The official about page is a marketing document with a loose timeline. The useful blocks are the first two. 1949: "We Started in a Kitchen." 1952: "We Became a Shop." Stefano Esposito's Sun-Times anniversary and Lindsay Alberti, the company's director of marketing, speaking to Scholastic in January 2024, both keep 10 West Madison as the first Chicago selling. Alberti: "our founder, Gladys Otto Garrett, brought her secret family recipes to Chicago and opened her first shop at 10 West Madison Street."

Timeline blocks for 1967, 1978, and 1996 repeat kitchen and legacy copy without events attached. This record does not invent any.

What she sold stays consistent across the company page and the later press: four coats, a nickel a bag, hand scooped, weighed, made in small batches. The official page claims fans lining up two and three hours. Galaba, in 2003, already treated the wait as a byproduct of the method. "We use only the highest quality ingredients and don't premake or prebag anything." Michigan Avenue cooked from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. A handful of gallon orders emptied the back.

Jane and Michael Stern, in Gourmet of December 2005, walked the Michigan Avenue flagship at 670 North Michigan while the family still owned it. Four city locations. Air-popped corn, coated in a galley, carried out in tin buckets, worked on a cooling table so clumps stayed at three or four kernels, then weighed into wax paper. Galaba told them the shop used real butter and a custom blend of mushroom and butterfly kernels. The Sterns called CaramelCrisp "the best caramel corn on earth." That is a magazine sentence, not a lab result, and it describes the shop the Chodys were about to buy.

Richard Phelps, 87, told Esposito in 2024 that he could smell the store a block away. "It's a Garrett smell." Andy Gregory, visiting from Kansas City, used the language of obligation. "Coming up to Chicago, it's kind of like nostalgia. I feel like we have to go."

The mix customers named

The combination came from the counter, not the company.

Hennessy, from Megan Chody: by the 1970s regulars ordered cheddar, caramel, and a third empty bag, then poured the two together themselves. The shops had scales. CaramelCrisp weighs more than CheeseCorn. "The family started to allow the mixing of both, but the minute you were one ounce over, they shook it off." Time Out dates a menu item, equal parts, to about 1977. Alberti repeated both the extra-bag story and the 1977 addition in 2024. Nick Kindelsperger, writing for the Tribune in January 2023, heard the same official line and recorded the older street names, "downtown mix" and "Chicago mix."

Gene Siskel put the half-and-half in the Tribune on 12 December 1986, four years after Gladys died. The paper printed his advice as a longtime enthusiast. He preferred home corn to the theater. If the budget was larger: "I recommend buying popcorn at one of the Garrett's Popcorn Shops (four Loop, one Michigan Avenue location), in which I have no financial interest whatsoever and have never ever been given so much as a kernel free." Not "goofball flavors." Plain, cheese, caramel. Then the recommendation: "a half-and-half mixture of caramel and cheese. You get a sweet-and-sour effect that's fabulous. It's not cheap, but the quality is very high."

That is a film critic treating a Loop shop as a better concession than the house popper, and buying off-site to carry corn in.

Locals called the bag Chicago Mix. The legal name belongs to St. Paul. Candyland opened there in 1932. Jerard Fagerberg, writing for Midwesterner on 26 April 2021, followed Brenda Lamb: she mixed caramel, cheddar, and regular salted popcorn after a 1988 Chicago candy expo and received a trademark in 1992. Candyland asked Garrett to stop in 2008 and sued Garrett, Snyder's-Lance, and Cornfields in 2014. NBC Chicago, 2 September 2014: Garrett, then operating as CaramelCrisp LLC, said it had already been moving to Garrett Mix "prior to any lawsuit," because grocery and drugstore bags had cheapened the phrase. Eater Chicago, 18 December 2014, reported the settlement. Chicago Mix is the former name. Garrett Mix is the name. Candyland's bag includes plain salted corn. Garrett's bag is caramel and cheese.

Oprah Winfrey's Favorite Things placements are demand events, not founding facts. Chody, on the order surge: "That launched our online shop and really took us to the next level." Esposito adds Donda West ordering for her son.

1982, and the floor after her

Gladys died in 1982. The retrieved pages give no month, no cause, and no cemetery.

O'Donnell wrote that after that death Joan, living in Streeterville, took on a larger role. Karen Zeisler on her mother: "She did everything. She made CaramelCrisp, she did deliveries, she hired people," and the books. The script logo, Karen said, is based on Joan's penmanship.

Galaba told the Tribune in 2003 that she took the helm after her mother retired in 1999. The Michigan Avenue shop then ran 1,200 square feet, twenty years on the Magnificent Mile, one of four in the city, seven flavors, $2 for a four-ounce bag. She was already shipping tins abroad at freight that could outweigh the corn. The Sterns, two years later, still counted four locations and the family name on the door.

The family sold in 2005. O'Donnell states it as a fact of Joan's life. Esposito quotes Megan Chody: "her family bought the company from the Garrett family in 2005."

The Chodys bought four shops

Megan and Lance Chody are why the corner Gladys opened is still a shop and also a chain. Megan is director of consumer engagement and, on the company's own pages, owner. Lance is chief executive of Garrett Brands. Kindelsperger, quoting Sandra Jones's 2005 Crain's Chicago Business story, wrote that "a touch of nostalgia played a role." Megan's version: "I craved two things when I was pregnant: Superdawg and Garrett's, and Superdawg wasn't for sale."

Her standing line about the coat has not changed. "We make it the exact same way. Nothing has changed, and it will not change."

What did change is reach. Hennessy credits the Chodys with social media, e-commerce, seasonal flavors, and the first shops outside Chicago. Protective locals disliked New York, so the next move went to Southeast Asia. Megan: "We wanted our Chicago base to understand we're not taking anything away from you." Time Out's 2019 count listed Atlanta, Las Vegas, Tokyo, Korea, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Malaysia, and 48 shops. Esposito, five years later, counted 14 Chicago-area stores plus Atlanta, Las Vegas, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, and shops across Asia. Print the dated counts rather than one footprint.

The line stayed a process fact. Megan, to Kindelsperger in 2023: "The line happens because we are making popcorn right there. It takes 24 minutes to make a batch of CaramelCrisp, and if it is not ready, people have to wait." Pickup windows and a drive-through exist. "Most of our fans like to wait in line. They've met people from all over the world. We'll never take that away for the sake of not having a line." Hennessy timed the same 24 minutes in 2019: seven kitchen ingredients, one of them butter, butterfly and mushroom kernels air-popped and then finished in the copper kettle, CheeseCorn coated in a tumbler. Counter staff taught Hennessy and Candace Jordan the same fill: CheeseCorn first, heavier CaramelCrisp on top, a sideways shake, a double fold, a crease.

On 30 January 2017 Garrett Brands announced it would acquire Frango from Macy's for an undisclosed amount. Lance Chody, in the statement Time Out and ABC7 printed, called Frango a fit for "iconic brands that have historic franchise value." Spokeswoman Michelle Molise told the Tribune that Frango would not be sold in Garrett shops. The company about timeline stamps that acquisition 2010; the contemporaneous reporting is 2017. Jordan, after a 2023 kitchen tour, wrote that the Chodys had launched in grocery the previous year. This atlas scores the tin 4.1 and seats Garrett at number 07: shop caramel and cheese, best for travelers and tins, and stale as bread by the second day. The grocery bag is an approximation of the shop, which is the snack-aisle problem rather than a Michigan Avenue one.

Esposito was allowed into the Michigan Avenue kitchen in September 2024 and asked not to photograph ingredients up close. Company figures for the prior twelve months: 122 million gallons of popcorn, 6 million pounds of brown sugar, 9 million pounds of cheddar, all of it on custom-grown, non-GMO butterfly and mushroom corn. Chody still left with a bag. "You might as well make sure the boss is happy."

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