People · 2026-08-26

Richard Kelty and Gene Mealhow

Richard "Sarge" Kelty replanted a handful of family seed from a Mason jar after retiring from the Army and built K&K Popcorn in Urbana, Iowa, which kept an open-pollinated small-kernel corn in commerce.
Gene Mealhow, hired as a soil consultant in 1994, moved yields from about 400 pounds an acre toward 1,000 by selection and fertilizer, bought the company in 1999, and renamed it Tiny But Mighty.
Kept the variety open-pollinated while taking it national: Fareway and Hy-Vee, Whole Foods after eight rejection letters, a KeHE distribution deal in 2013, and all fifty states by 2015. This atlas scores it 4.8 and ranks it 01.

Two Iowa farm families, in sequence, kept an open-pollinated popcorn in commerce. Richard "Sarge" Kelty rescued the seed and founded the company that first sold it. Gene Mealhow, with Lynn Mealhow, bought that company in 1999 and still grows, packs, and ships the corn from a farm north of Shellsburg.

The change is not volume. It is the kernel: a multi-ear Iowa heirloom whose pericarp comes apart in the popper. Tiny kernels, tiny hulls, and they vanish when they pop. That is why this atlas scores Tiny But Mighty 4.8 and seats it at number 01 of the brand list, ahead of every flavor lab on the shelf.

Two names that circulate do not belong on the founding line. Kevin Sabo is a later business-side operator with a punning title. Samuel Kelty in the 1850s is family and brand tradition, not a nineteenth-century document anyone retrieved for this piece.

A seed that is not a document

The company site, retrieved in 2026, still opens the origin as a tale. "It was discovered by Samuel Kelty in Shellsburg, Iowa in the 1850s, and kept in the Kelty family for over 100 years." The same page calls Richard Kelty Samuel's "great, great, great grandson," then skips three generations to the Mason-jar rescue. The Why Heirloom page loosens the name to "discovered by a pioneer family in the 1850s near Cedar Rapids, Iowa," now "cared for and brought to you by Gene and Lynn Mealhow and their family."

Carly Kelty-Greenfield, Richard's granddaughter, wrote the family version for Mother Earth Gardener on 20 February 2018. "The popcorn story goes that my great, great, great grandfather Samuel Kelty or one of his ancestors acquired the tiny popcorn seeds by way of the Native Americans." The hedge is in her own sentence: Samuel, or someone before him. Gene Mealhow told New Pioneer Co-op that the family either found the popcorn "growing wild, or traded the Native Americans for it," and that Richard's mother later asked whether he wanted "some of grandpa's corn." They found a single jar.

Those are tellings. They do not agree on a discoverer, a year, or a transfer, and no nineteenth-century record retrieved here names Samuel Kelty as the man who first held the corn.

Urbana, a Mason jar, K&K

Richard "Sarge" Kelty was born 17 August 1936 in Vinton, Iowa, to Howard and Dixie (Wilford) Kelty. He graduated from Urbana High School in 1954 and married Rita Zieser at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Urbana on 28 June 1955. He joined the Army a few years later. The obituary is specific about the end of that career: he retired from the U.S. Army in 1982 at the rank of Sergeant First Class after twenty years, came home to Urbana, and "founded the K & K Popcorn business." Kelty-Greenfield names the cousin who supplied the second K as Kramer; no first name was found. Rita died 21 January 2011. Richard died 16 April 2015, age 78, at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, and is buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in Urbana. The Gazette says he died "following a brief illness." Kelty-Greenfield writes that he "died unexpectedly following an accident in 2015." Both are in the record.

The founding year is a conflict worth keeping open. The Gazette obituary and Kelty-Greenfield both put Army retirement in 1982 and the popcorn company after the return to Urbana. Wikipedia, and the pages that copy it, say he retired in the mid-1970s and founded K&K in 1981. Food Navigator, on 7 December 2015, has Kelty parenthetically "started planting in the 1970s after discovering some seeds his family had kept in a fruit jar," which is a planting sentence, not a military date. The 1981 year is widely repeated. The 1982 retirement is the better-sourced military date. Dave Rasdal's 1995 Gazette feature, the piece Wikipedia leans on, was not retrieved.

What survives without that 1995 text is the rescue and the farm shop. The company site still tells the jar story as Richard finding his mother about to pop the last kernels and taking a few handfuls to plant instead. Kelty-Greenfield's version is a handful at the bottom of a Mason jar. In the mid-1990s she was in the Urbana barn: orange lamps, corn dust, glossy K&K labels, and "the old desk and rotary phone where my grandpa and grandma took the popcorn orders." Rita is a co-operator in every account that looks closely. Disney Channel's Pass the Plate filmed the two men in 2014, and Gene told Richard, "One of the greatest days of my life is when I met you." This essay did not view the tape and prints the line as the granddaughter printed it.

A soil consultant from Shellsburg

Gene Mealhow has no retrieved birth date. Kim Severson, in The New York Times of 30 September 2014, datelined Shellsburg, called him 59 and "a soil expert who still looks very much like the hippie drummer he once was." The same piece called Lynn Mealhow 60. Those are 2014 ages, not vital records.

Jeff Raasch, in The Gazette of 7 March 2013, has the farm-crisis turn. It was 1989. Gene's father and uncle retired. Gene told his wife, then pregnant with their fourth son, that they would farm without chemicals. He started with vegetables and tofu beans. "I was called the weed farmer of Benton County," he told Raasch. New Pioneer Co-op later quoted him: "All I knew was, I was expecting my fourth child at the time, I'm not going to do the chemical thing." New Pi has him buying thirty-three acres and calling himself a third-generation farmer; AGCO FarmLife snippets call him a fourth-generation farmer who bought 33 acres near Shellsburg in 1990. Third and fourth are both in circulation.

He was working as a soil consultant in the 1990s when he met Richard Kelty, who was trying to grow the popcorn near Urbana. New Pi dates the hire to 1994. Yields, in Food Navigator and the company FAQ, moved from about 400 pounds an acre, with the FAQ allowing 400 to 600, up to 1,000, through selection and a change in fertilizer. Later figures are not one number: the live FAQ says around 2,600 pounds an acre, and Food Navigator in December 2015 has him at "almost 3,000 lb/acre," still far under hybrid popcorn at 5,000 to 10,000. An heirloom that could not pay stayed open-pollinated and became a brand anyway.

1999

Then Kelty wanted to sell, and here the press is wrong about his age in a way that keeps getting copied. Food Navigator: "the business started growing, but he was in his early 80s and he wanted to sell." New Pi says Richard was "now in his eighties." Richard Kelty was born in 1936. In 1999 he was 62 or 63. Print the eighties figure as an error, not a fact.

The sale year is 1999 in every retrieved Iowa and trade piece that names one. Raasch: "when Kelty retired in 1999, he sold the business, Tiny But Mighty Popcorn, to Mealhow." Food Navigator, quoting Gene: "we moved it here [Shellsburg, Iowa] in 1999." Wikipedia, citing Steve Meyer in The Gazette of 12 September 1999, dates the purchase to 1 July 1999; that Gazette text was not retrieved, so the day stays Wikipedia's citation rather than this record's date. New Pi has the ask itself. Gene walked into the field and raised it. Richard "stopped, hooked his thumbs into his overalls," and said, "I wondered how long it was gonna take you to ask."

Lynn Mealhow is a documented co-owner and on-farm operator who is rarely quoted. The Why Heirloom page credits "Gene and Lynn Mealhow and their family." The Gazette obituary of her mother, Betty A. Kluber, who died 31 December 2017, lists "Lynn (Gene) Mealhow of Shellsburg" among Betty's daughters, which is the source for the Kluber name. Raasch's 2013 photo caption has Lynn's brother Mark Kluber packing orders beside Gene. Severson gave Lynn a sentence of her own: stove-top popping, she said, is "a lost art." The same piece reported that the Mealhows would start selling a microwave version that month, "despite the objections of Ms. Mealhow, 60, a popcorn traditionalist."

The kernel

What the two families changed is the object in the pan. The plant is not a conventional popcorn hybrid. Food Navigator and the company FAQ agree on the habit: a short bush with several stalks and many ears rather than one stalk and one ear. The FAQ puts plant height at three to five feet and ears at three to four inches. Kernels are lemon-yellow and about half the size of conventional popcorn. Gene has claimed a record of 36 ears on one plant, a figure that appears in Food Navigator, the FAQ, and the 2016 fact sheet, and it stays his claim.

The variety, in the brand's account, has never been hybridized. The FAQ also calls it dent-sterile and "its very own unique species," and says Gene "had it tested at Purdue University along with other experts" who found no matching genotype. No public Purdue paper was found, so Purdue and "unique species" are company claims. His work is selection and soil, not a hybrid program on the Purdue and Ag Alumni model. "When I walk in this field and I look at these plants, that's years of my corn breeding that you're looking at. I feel like the caretaker. These are my babies," he says on the Our Story page. He told Food Navigator he has "developed some new varieties as there is a huge genetic base in it," and the FAQ says he still does annual seed selection.

The hull is the commercial fact. Larger hybrid popcorns carry a thicker pericarp, the sharp fragment that lodges under a gum. The FAQ describes a thin, small hull that "virtually disintegrates" when it pops, and Food Navigator uses the same verb. Raasch wrote that the smaller kernel "leaves almost no hull when it pops." Severson, standing in front of the Mealhow farmhouse, described "small, pearly flint corn" whose "only purpose is to pop into small, crisp puffs that taste of pure toasted corn," with hulls "that seem to all but disappear."

Flavor, in the clips that taste it, is toasted corn, nutty, with a denser flake. "When people first try our popcorn, one of the things they notice right away is the flavor," Mealhow told Food Navigator. The FAQ says people who avoid popcorn because of diverticulitis, Crohn's, or IBS can often eat this one; no clinical trial was retrieved. Farming practice is biological and close to organic without being certified: organic fertilizers, one early-season non-residual and non-systemic herbicide, no pesticides. Raasch in 2013 loosely called the product organic popcorn, which is looser than the company's own wording. It is not USDA organic.

The farm that scaled a variety

After the purchase, processing moved from the Kelty barn in Urbana to the Mealhow farm north of Shellsburg. Raasch's 2013 photographs show a gravity separator, ready-to-eat bags, and Mark Kluber packing mail orders. Fareway already carried the smaller kernel. Gene went store by store at Hy-Vee. Whole Foods sent back "eight of the most wonderful rejection letters you ever saw," he told Raasch, until a Willowbrook, Illinois, manager put three cases on the shelf and sold out in ten days. By March 2013 the popcorn was in most Fareway and Hy-Vee stores and about forty Whole Foods locations, and Mealhow had just signed KeHE: nine warehouses and, in Raasch's wording, access to 30,000 grocery accounts.

FamilyFarmed, in Chicago, is the other hinge. Jim Slama helped the Mealhows with a business plan and an investor pitch. Ashley Arp, writing on 10 February 2015 as marketing manager and as Gene and Lynn's niece, called them "the company's founders." That is a niece's byline for the brand they operate, and it is not the founding of K&K. The same circle introduced Kevin Sabo, who was then a University of Chicago Booth student and a FamilyFarmed volunteer and who, the 1 October 2014 recap says, "now holds the position of Tiny but Mighty's Chief Poperating Officer." He is a business-side operator, not a farmer and not a founder.

By December 2015 Food Navigator had the distribution Gene would name: all fifty states, UNFI, Sprouts, Whole Foods nationally, independents, Amazon, and TJ Maxx. Three lines: unpopped for people he called "professional popcorn eaters," ready-to-eat, and microwave, "which I didn't want to do originally." He was growing, he said, 1 to 2 million pounds a year and aiming at 5 to 6 million inside "a billion pound industry." Wikipedia, citing a 13 May 2015 Des Moines Register item not retrieved here, prints about 1.6 million pounds, 18 employees, and $3 million to $5 million without keeping revenue and profit straight, so that dollar range is not treated as audited.

The volume history of Iowa popcorn belongs to other houses: Cloid Smith and JOLLY TIME in Sioux City, Weaver in Indiana, and the public hybrid programs. What these two families kept is a near-lost open-pollinated ear, a hull that fails on purpose, and a farm-to-shelf heirloom that survived as a brand without becoming a hybrid. No sale or new owner appears in later press retrieved here. The company site, still live in 2026, calls Gene the current caretaker and credits Gene and Lynn Mealhow and their family.