SEQUIM — Its crunchy, sweet and salty taste has pushed Casey’s Kettle Corn of Sequim into a national brand distributed in some 46 states.
On an average workday, the company’s small production crew at 160 Harrison Road produces about 1,200 bags of kettle corn, or about 200 per hour, said Casey Dennis, Casey’s Kettle Corn chief executive officer and company founder.
“Last year, we produced in excess of 150,000 bags,” he said, adding that in 2013 the company produced only about 40,000 bags, “so we are growing significantly.”
The company employs one full time employee and four part time workers.
“We hope we have to add more jobs, because I have the equipment in place that can double our current production capacity” if demand continues to grow, Dennis said.
“I can go to 400 bags per hour versus the 200 that I do now just by adding one to two full-time positions.”
At peak capacity, the company’s kettle corn factory potentially could pop and stuff up to two million bags per year.
The snack retails for about $3.75 a bag, depending on location, and generated about $250,000 in gross revenue for the company last year, Dennis said.
“We are already kind of a household brand in the Northwest,” Dennis said.
“We are a bit of a dominant player in the Northwest, and we are getting good penetration up and down the West Coast.”
And while “there are national brands that are out there that have better distribution, we are kind of hanging our hat on being a regional brand that really focuses on quality and value.”
“The cooking process is a real art,” Dennis said, adding his production staff is “constantly monitoring the quality of the product as it is coming through to make sure everything is right.
“If there is anything questionable, it goes straight into the trash can,” he said.
The process starts with 50-pound sacks of raw popping corn delivered 50 at a time on pallets. That equates to 2,500 pounds per pallet.
Once popped, the corn has expanded about 44.5 times in volume, which means one pallet of unpopped corn is transformed into nearly 45 pallets of finished product.
Kettle corn isn’t only about the quality of the grain used, but the extra ingredients that make it salty and sweet, Dennis said.
“For every 50 pounds of popcorn we go through 25 pounds of sugar,” he said.
“It is the balance between the sweet and the salt” that makes the snack.
Dennis also utilizes a secret ingredient.
“I make my own caramel and we grind that up into a fine powder and add it to the mix, and the butter fat in that . . . just adds a nice three-dimensional flavor to the product,” he said.
During the popping phase, the raw corn is cooked in coconut oil.
“Coconut oil doesn’t really have a sweet flavor to it,” Dennis said.
“We like it because it helps improve the shelf life and stability of the product. Because it is 100 percent saturated, it doesn’t go rancid.”
The average shelf life for the kettle corn made at the factory is about 90 days once it is bagged, Dennis noted.
After being popped, the popcorn is placed into a sifting table, where the smaller pieces and unpopped seeds fall through a grate.
This is so the amount of seeds that end up in the bottom of the transparent retail bags is minimal, Dennis explained.
After being sifted, the larger kernels are transferred to a conveyor that takes them into a hopper that feeds the packaging machine.
A crew member fills the retail bags one at a time before sending them down the line to be packaged into boxes and shipped out to retailers.
Dennis, an Olympic Peninsula native and Sequim-area resident, founded the company in 2001 after buying a portable popping machine.
“I started just doing fairs and festivals,” he said. “I would have lines 45 minutes long.
“It is a very popular product, so I knew if we did it right with the right quality that it would probably have the same appeal at the wholesale level as well, and that has proven to be very much the case.”
In 2002, Swain’s General Store in Port Angeles agreed to sell his product at their registers. At that time, he was producing the kettle corn out of his garage.
As his success grew, the operation became too large to operate at home, so in 2012 the company moved into a custom-built 1,600-square-foot food-processing facility.
“It has been a vast improvement over working in the garage,” Dennis said.
At about that time, the Ace Hardware Corporation and the True Value Company began to sell his kettle corn at their stores nationwide.
Currently, Casey’s Kettle Corn is available in all states except Maine, New Hampshire, Maryland and Hawaii.
Dennis is also looking into expanding into Canada.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
