Popcorn Atlas

People · 2026-08-26

Orville Redenbacher

  • Bought the George F. Chester and Son seed-corn plant with Charles F. Bowman in 1951, renamed it Chester Hybrids, and spent the next quarter century on popping corn.
  • Sold the Chester gourmet hybrid in a 30-ounce jar under his own name and face from 1970, priced above the rest of the aisle, and opened the national account list at Marshall Field's in Chicago in March 1971.
  • Took about one-third of the United States unpopped grocery market by the mid-1970s, then sold the popcorn operation to Hunt-Wesson in 1976.

A jar with a face on it

By 1970 Chester, Inc. of Valparaiso, Indiana, held a hybrid the popcorn trade had already refused. It cost more per hundredweight than the corn it was meant to replace, and processors buying in bulk saw no reason to pay for expansion. Redenbacher and his partner Charles F. Bowman carried it to a Chicago advertising agency, Gerson, Howe and Johnson, and paid $13,000 for an answer. Kevin Fish, Redenbacher's eldest grandchild, writing in Farm Progress on 6 January 2018, records the advice: rename the corn Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn and put the grower's face on the label.

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 atlas did not retrieve that newspaper. Purdue's alumni page and Fish both treat 1970 as the year the named product reached shelves. Fish dates the first national promotion to March 1971, when Redenbacher took jars to Marshall Field's in Chicago, learned the names of 42 officers and department managers, left each of them a personalized jar, and autographed packages in the seventh-floor pantry.

The glass did work the label could not. In the 1975 Hunt-Wesson promotional book, Orville Redenbacher's Authorized and Complete Popcorn Lover's Guide, he says he chose jars because bags, boxes, and tins leak moisture once a customer opens them, and popping corn that dries out stops expanding. Bruce Hamaker, at Purdue in 2020, put the working range at about 13 to 14.5 percent of kernel weight. The Los Angeles Times quoted Redenbacher's own target as 13.25 percent. A premium claim survives contact with a customer's kitchen only if the package holds that number.

Clay County, Purdue, the extension desk

Brian B. Carpenter's entry in the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, reprinted by Encyclopedia.com, gives the birth as 16 July 1907 near Brazil, Indiana, one of four children of William Redenbacher, a farmer, and Julia Magdelena Dierdoff. Robert W. Topping's Just Call Me Orville, working from family papers, places the farm in Jackson Township about seven miles south of Brazil and says William named the boy for Orville Wright. The encyclopedia has him the first in the family to attend high school, a Clay County 4-H champion, and a 1924 graduate of Brazil High School. He held a West Point appointment and let it go.

Purdue's College of Agriculture, writing in 2023, is precise about the campus years. He earned a bachelor's degree in agronomy in June 1928. He joined Alpha Gamma Rho, played sousaphone in the All-American Marching Band, and edited the Debris, the Agriculturist, and the Purdue Exponent. Encyclopedia.com adds the track team and the farm jobs that paid tuition. The university awarded him an honorary doctorate in agriculture in 1988, confirmed by both the 2023 Purdue page and the Los Angeles Times. That is an alumni honor rather than a scientific credential.

He taught vocational agriculture, biology, and industrial arts at Fontanet High School. On 26 December 1928 he married Corinne Rosemond Strate, an Indiana University journalism student; Encyclopedia.com and Topping agree on the date. They had three daughters. The Los Angeles Times named two survivors in 1995, Gail Tuminello of Valparaiso and Billie Ann Atwood of San Jose. Topping's acknowledgments record the middle daughter, Sue Gourley, who died in 1993.

The extension years came first and paid least. Horace Abbott, the Clay County agent who had mentored him in high school, brought him onto the Vigo County staff. Encyclopedia.com dates the Clay County appointment to 1929 and the Vigo County appointment to 1932, and credits him with noon radio crop reports over Terre Haute, which the Los Angeles Times repeats. Depression and drought were emptying the farms he advised. The Princeton Mining Company offered him management of a 12,000-acre farm near Princeton, Indiana, with a house, $4,500 a year, and 10 percent of profits.

Princeton Farms, 1940 to 1951

Fish gives the cleanest chronology of the farm decade. Redenbacher managed Princeton Farms from 1940 to 1951. His first project was a hybrid dent seed-corn processing plant. In 1941 he started hybrid popcorn there, using Purdue's hybrids, and the farm opened a winter nursery at Homestead, Florida, the same year. By 1946 Princeton had popcorn hybrids of its own alongside Purdue's. In 1943 the farm sold packaged popping corn under the Princeton Farm name. The brand site and Encyclopedia.com later date supermarket popcorn to 1944. Both years belong in the record.

The public science ran ahead of any one farm. 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 dates to 1938. The belt's move from open-pollinated varieties to hybrids is a university and seed-house story, mapped in The hybrid and the belt. Princeton Farms is one operation inside it.

Chester, 1951, and a partner who ran it

In 1951 Redenbacher and Bowman bought the George F. Chester and Son seed-corn plant. MLive and The Grand Rapids Press, in Bowman's 13 April 2009 obituary, date the purchase to 1951 and place it at Boone Grove, Indiana. Indiana Humanities, in a 2010 sketch, agrees and adds the rename to Chester Hybrids, near Valparaiso. Purdue's 2019 agriculture timeline prints the same year.

Three other dates circulate. The NWI Times, marking Chester, Inc. at 75, says the two men "started Chester Inc. in 1947," which is a company-founding date on an anniversary page rather than the seed-plant transaction. Redenbacher's 1975 book, and the Los Angeles Times after it, date the move into business with Bowman to 1952. Encyclopedia.com folds the 1940 Princeton Farms appointment and the Chester purchase into a single 1940 partnership, which no other retrieved source supports. This record uses 1951 and prints the rest as the conflict it is.

The contemporary obituaries put Bowman in the operating chair. MLive: "Bowman served as company president while Redenbacher developed the hybrids that produced the popcorn." He stayed president until 2006 and died on 8 April 2009. Stephen Miller's Wall Street Journal obituary of 18 April 2009 ran under the headline "Orville Redenbacher's Popcorn Partner Shared the Wealth, if Not the Celebrity." Redenbacher was the man customers could meet. The company had a president who was not him.

Hartman's cross, and two sets of numbers

Carl Hartman joined Chester in 1959 as plant breeder. Redenbacher's own 1975 book introduces him by name: "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." He calls Hartman "a truly fine professional plant breeder" and writes that "working together we developed the genuinely superior popping corn." Topping's acknowledgments are sharper. He thanks "Carl Hartman, plant breeder for Chester, Inc., who developed the 'gourmet' hybrid that made Orville famous."

Fish dates the result: Hartman, "the company's breeding expert who was hired in 1959, worked with Redenbacher to develop a new breed of popcorn. A breakthrough occurred in 1965." The partners first sold that corn as Red-Bow, a blend of the two surnames. It failed in the trade. The 1975 book explains why in one line: "the popcorn industry didn't want it, because it had to cost a bit more."

The cross count comes in two sizes, and both are printed. The Los Angeles Times obituary says he tried "about 30,000 corn hybrids," a figure brand copy has carried for decades. The 1975 book, written when the nursery was still running, claims about 9,000 cross pollinations and inbreeds a year across two sites. Expansion figures split the same way: orville.com prints a 44:1 popped-to-unpopped ratio as company fact, while the 1975 book claimed "40 times or more" against usual popcorns at about 30. The brand timeline dates a 1965 perfection to Redenbacher and Bowman and leaves Hartman's name off the page.

One-third of the aisle

Indiana Humanities, in 2010: "Within a few short years, Orville Redenbacher popcorn had captured one-third of the market of unpopped popcorn." Wikipedia applies the same fraction to the mid-1970s. That share is grocery shelf, not theater concession, and it arrived in an aisle Cloid H. Smith had helped build in Sioux City from 1914, with a graded kernel and, by the mid-1920s, a vacuum tin that could print a guarantee. Guaranteed to pop covers that tin. The gourmet jar sat on top of it as a premium SKU at a premium price.

Distribution then outgrew a Valparaiso seed house. Fish: in late 1971 Chester and Blue Plate Foods, a New Orleans subsidiary of Hunt-Wesson, agreed that Blue Plate would take distribution. In 1972 Blue Plate ran a national campaign while Redenbacher spent six months on the road persuading grocers to stock the jar. In 1974 Hunt-Wesson divested Blue Plate and kept the popcorn rights. In 1976 Chester sold the popcorn operation to Hunt-Wesson outright. FundingUniverse's reprint of the International Directory of Company Histories confirms 1976, as do Indiana Humanities and Wikipedia. The Los Angeles Times later printed 1978 and a reported $2 million. This record uses 1976 and prints no price.

Hunt-Wesson, then the conglomerates

The buyer had capital for a category the seller could not fund. The International Directory dates Hunt-Wesson's microwave development to 1980 and the introduction of Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popping Corn to 1983, calling it the first shelf-stable microwave popcorn. Golden Valley's Act II, from James D. Watkins, carries a competing 1984 mass-market date, told in The bag that hissed. Both dates stand in the record with their claimants attached.

Ownership moved fast after that. Norton Simon, Inc., which held Hunt-Wesson, went to Esmark in 1983. Beatrice bought Esmark in 1984. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took Beatrice private in 1985 as BCI Holding. On 8 June 1990 the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press reported ConAgra's agreement to buy Beatrice for $1.34 billion in cash and stock, naming Orville Redenbacher's popcorn among the principal brands inside Fullerton-based Hunt-Wesson, "the largest Beatrice food division." FundingUniverse later used $1.36 billion for Hunt-Wesson, Swift-Eckrich, and Beatrice Cheese together. The popcorn-only price was never published.

Redenbacher stayed on camera through every one of those owners. Encyclopedia.com records that Hunt-Wesson renegotiated to keep the label "into perpetuity" and kept him as spokesman. Corinne died in 1971 of a bleeding ulcer. He married Nina Reder on 27 October 1971, and she died in 1991. He filmed commercials with his grandson Gary.

Coronado, 19 September 1995

He had moved to Coronado, California, in the mid-1970s. The Los Angeles Times of 20 September 1995 reported that a building worker found him about 6 a.m. Tuesday in the whirlpool of his Coronado Shores condominium, and that he had drowned after a heart attack. Cal Vine, supervising investigator at the San Diego County medical examiner's office, is the named source. He was 88.

The New York Times of the same date, as The New Yorker reprinted the lead in 1998 and Wikipedia quotes it, called him "the agricultural visionary who all but single-handedly revolutionized the American popcorn industry" and printed the same mechanics: "He was found in a bathtub with a whirlpool in his condominium, where he drowned after a heart attack, the medical examiner's office said. He was eighty-eight." Topping dates the death itself to 19 September 1995 at Coronado Shores; both papers published on the 20th. Encyclopedia.com, writing later, reduced the death to a heart attack in the apartment and left out the water.

William E. Smith, executive director of the Popcorn Institute and a friend of 43 years, told the Los Angeles Times, "Many people thought he was a media creation, but what people saw on television, that was him." Encyclopedia.com records the cremation and the ashes scattered at sea.

Sources

FAQ

Who was Orville Redenbacher?
An Indiana agronomist (Purdue, class of 1928) who, with partner Charles F. Bowman, commercialized a high-expansion popping hybrid and sold it from 1970 in a 30-ounce jar under his own name and face as Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn.
What did Orville Redenbacher invent?
He did not invent popcorn. With Bowman he brought a Chester hybrid the bulk trade had refused into grocery as a premium jar; plant breeder Carl Hartman developed the gourmet hybrid that made the brand. By the mid-1970s the jar held about one-third of the U.S. unpopped grocery market, and the popcorn operation sold to Hunt-Wesson in 1976.
When did Orville Redenbacher die?
19 September 1995, at 88, in his Coronado Shores condominium in Coronado, California. The San Diego County medical examiner reported he drowned in a whirlpool after a heart attack; newspapers published the next day.