People · 2026-08-26

James D. Watkins

Left Pillsbury and founded Golden Valley Microwave Foods in Edina, Minnesota, in September 1978.
Sole inventor on U.S. Patent 4,450,180, filed 7 July 1980 and issued 22 May 1984, the two-tube bag whose specification tables report volumetric gains of about 9 to 16 percent; Act I shipped frozen from 1981.
Introduced Act II in October 1984 with susceptor material bonded between the plies of the popcorn bag, which took the product out of the cooler and onto the dry grocery shelf; Conagra announced its purchase of Golden Valley in April 1991 in a stock swap UPI valued near $496 million.

Edina, September 1978

The standard industry chronology, carried by Wikipedia's Act II entry and uncontradicted by the court findings that later examined the same years, has Watkins at Pillsbury from 1971 to 1978 and founding Golden Valley Microwave Foods in Edina in September 1978. The Northern District of Indiana, reviewing the company's history in 1992, found that Watkins, David W. Andreas, and David H. Cox had all been Pillsbury employees "involved with the design, development and/or marketing of microwave popcorn" before Golden Valley existed. Lawrence Brandberg, who signed later Golden Valley affidavits, and James Harmon, the company's outside patent counsel, came from Pillsbury too.

Popz's company history dates "Jim Watkins sells his first bag of microwave popcorn" to 1971, which on the court record describes work done inside Pillsbury. The independent firm starts in 1978.

The personal file stops there. No birth date appears on the patents, in the Weaver findings, in UPI's coverage, or on the company pages retrieved for this essay, and no obituary for this James D. Watkins turned up. Minnesota Fun Facts lists him as Rochester on a roster of people born or raised in the state, which is that site's line. Two other men share the name in published notices, a Navy admiral who died in 2012 and a Long Beach, Mississippi, resident whose family published a 2026 notice; neither is the Golden Valley founder. This atlas prints no vital dates for him.

The corporate name settled later than the company. The 1980 patent issued to Golden Valley Foods, Inc., of Eden Prairie, and an assignment recorded 21 February 1990 recites a Minnesota name change of 25 May 1987 to Golden Valley Microwave Foods, Inc. The business was never popcorn alone. UPI, writing in 1991, was still describing a microwave french fry and a Lamb-Weston potato joint venture.

The oven, and the bag that came before

Percy L. Spencer's U.S. Patent 2,495,429, "Method of treating foodstuffs," was filed 8 October 1945 and issued 24 January 1950, assigned to Raytheon Manufacturing Company. Its claims cover generating microwave energy, concentrating it, and holding a foodstuff in it long enough to cook. The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center biography, which checked Maine birth records, dates Spencer 9 July 1894 to 7 September 1970 and records the laboratory sequence of a melted candy bar, then popcorn kernels in front of a magnetron, then an egg. His popcorn-specific grant, U.S. 2,480,679, filed 29 March 1947 and issued 30 August 1949, claims a seasoned unshelled ear sealed in a bag transparent to radio-frequency energy and popped in 20 to 45 seconds, with the bag catching kernels that fly off the cob.

The grocery bag starts at Pillsbury. U.S. 3,973,045, "Popcorn package for microwave popping," lists Lawrence C. Brandberg and David W. Andreas as inventors, assignors to the Pillsbury Company, filed 14 May 1973 and issued 3 August 1976. The package is a flexible gusseted bag of two paper plies, kraft outside and a glassine liner inside, sealed so steam inflates it, holding about eight parts corn to one to five parts shortening with salt. The specification excludes one ingredient by name: "Butter will not serve the purpose of the invention and is specifically excluded." The bags were built for refrigerated vending and institutional ovens of about 600 to 1,400 watts. The Weaver court later found that Pillsbury introduced that bag, without microwave-interactive material, in the early to mid-1970s, and that Golden Valley sold popcorn in a bag matching the Brandberg structure through the 1970s and early 1980s.

The yield bag, still frozen

U.S. 4,450,180, "Package for increasing the volumetric yield of microwave cooked popcorn," names Watkins as sole inventor, filed 7 July 1980 and issued 22 May 1984 to Golden Valley Foods, Inc. Its continuation, U.S. 4,548,826, was filed 17 February 1984 and issued 22 October 1985.

The claim is geometry. The specification cites Brandberg as prior art in which the charge is "distributed throughout the full cross section of the bag," then describes a bag of "collateral tubular configuration": two parallel longitudinal tubes joined at the center, with substantially all of the popcorn and fat loaded into one of them. The filled tube rests on the oven floor and takes the heat. The empty tube stays free to expand as flakes fill it. Tables in the patent report volumetric gains on the order of 9 to 16 percent against a homogeneous fill, which in a category sold on flakes per bag is the difference between two brands on the same shelf.

The formula given as satisfactory is 68.5 percent corn, 27.6 percent fat, and 2.8 percent salt, with the fat specified as hydrogenated coconut oil. One sentence in the specification defines the product's whole distribution problem: "Packages are shipped frozen and maintained under refrigerated conditions prior to use." There is no susceptor in 4,450,180, only paper, a lateral charge, and a freezer.

Act I launched in 1981 into refrigerated vending and the freezer case. Wikipedia and later snack pages say it used real butter and therefore needed cold storage; the 1980 patent specifies coconut oil and still requires refrigeration. Both statements are printed here as what their sources say. The channel is the fact that matters: a product that needs a cooler cannot become a pantry staple, and Golden Valley's next four years went into removing the cooler.

October 1984, a patch between the plies

Judge William C. Lee reconstructed the sequence from testimony and company files, and the dates are the clearest public account of how the shelf-stable bag came together.

In about July 1982 Golden Valley people saw Totino's Pizza, a Pillsbury product, in a package with a susceptor, a microwave-interactive layer that heats up, bonded to paperboard under the pie. They called James River Corporation, which made that package and sold the stock as Qwik Crisp. James River would not sell it to them then. In October 1983 they saw a Wyandot commercial popcorn container with a similar susceptor bonded under a charge of corn and oil. Golden Valley obtained Qwik Crisp susceptor roll stock in March or April 1984 and tested it inside the bag, outside the bag, and between the two plies of its existing popcorn bag. In the court's words: "In October of 1984, Golden Valley publicly introduced its ACT II bag in which susceptor material was bonded between the plies of its conventional popcorn bag."

Two shelf-stable claims sit next to each other in the record. Hunt-Wesson's corporate history says the company began exploring a microwave product in 1980 and "by 1983 it introduced the first shelf stable microwave popcorn, Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popping Corn," a brand covered in the life of Orville Redenbacher. Wikipedia calls the October 1984 Act II bag the first mass-marketed microwave popcorn. The bag that hissed carries both dates rather than picking one.

The patent file, and what a court found in it

The first Golden Valley susceptor filing never issued. On 21 May 1984 Harmon filed U.S. application 612,723, "Popcorn Package," listing Watkins as sole inventor and naming James River of Kalamazoo as the source of the metallized stock. Examiner Steven L. Weinstein, who already had the Brandberg bag and Watkins's 4,450,180 in front of him, rejected every claim as obvious. The application went abandoned as of 11 September 1985.

On 3 June 1985, while 612,723 was still co-pending, Golden Valley filed what became U.S. 4,735,513, "Flexible packaging sheets," issued 5 April 1988 to Watkins, Andreas, and Cox. A continuation-in-part issued on 7 November 1989 as U.S. 4,878,765. Both were assigned to Golden Valley and, in 1998, to Conagra.

Golden Valley sued Weaver Popcorn, the Indiana processor built by Ira Weaver and later run by Mike Weaver, for infringement. After a bench trial on Patent Office conduct, Judge Lee found that Golden Valley had withheld the abandoned 612,723 file, steered the new application toward a laminates art unit, withheld James River's Qwik Crisp, the Wyandot container, and the Brandberg patent, and submitted a comparative-test affidavit the court called materially false. He held both patents unenforceable. Those findings, reported at Golden Valley Microwave Foods, Inc. v. Weaver Popcorn Co., 837 F. Supp. 1444 (N.D. Ind. 1992), are the public record of how the parts of the Act II bag were assembled: James River made the heater stock, Wyandot had already sold a box with a patch under the charge, Brandberg and Andreas had already sold the two-ply bag, and Golden Valley put the patch between the plies and shipped it to grocery.

The category, and the price of it

By 1987 microwave popcorn was a fight between national brands. The New York Times of 22 June 1987, in sentences its search snippet still prints, reported that 1983, "the first full year that microwave popcorn was available nationally," generated $53 million at retail, per Packaged Facts, and that consumers popped an estimated $250 million worth the previous year, per the Popcorn Institute.

UPI, writing on 22 April 1991, called retail microwave popcorn a $1 billion category. Conagra already held about 20 percent of it with Orville Redenbacher's, and the Golden Valley deal would add "a 30 percent share of the general merchandise market with Golden Valley's Act II brand." Stephen Carnes of Piper, Jaffray & Hopwood told UPI the combination put Conagra "at the undisputed top of the heap in microwave popcorn," and called Golden Valley "the most knowledgeable and technologically advanced company in the United States in microwave food preparation."

The terms: a stock swap UPI valued at about $496 million, with each Golden Valley share converting to 0.5676 share of Conagra. Golden Valley, based in Edina, had reported sales of $172.3 million in the fiscal year ended December 1990. The two companies were already partners in the Lamb-Weston potato venture. Conagra said completion should come in June, subject to shareholder approval. The New York Times ran the deal on 23 April 1991 under the headline "COMPANY NEWS; Conagra to Buy Popcorn Maker." A later Conagra Form 10-K lists the Golden Valley acquisition in 1992, so the announcement year and the fiscal listing both appear in the record.

Conagra had bought Beatrice, and with it Hunt-Wesson, in 1990. The 1991 purchase put the premium jar and the mass-market bag inside the same Omaha company.

The two products had been sold as rivals. Hunt-Wesson had bought the gourmet jar in 1976, introduced its microwave bag in 1983, and kept Redenbacher on camera through the Beatrice years and into the Conagra years. Golden Valley had taken a refrigerated Pillsbury-style bag, redesigned its geometry, then bonded a heater between the plies and sold the result as a dry-goods item. The 1991 stock swap put two already-national SKUs under one buyer, with Redenbacher as the premium face and Act II as the volume bag.

After the sale

Popz's company history dates a June 1999 brand launch, and Minnesota Fun Facts says Watkins formed Popz Holding in 2000 and that POPZ became the leading brand of microwave popcorn in Europe; those are the sites' claims, and this essay retrieved no European share table to test them. Wikipedia's Act II page records that the Edina facility later closed, with production moved to other plants in the United States and Mexico.