A look inside LesserEvil’s popcorn factory

When you enter LesserEvil’s 33,000-square-foot snack factory in Danbury, Connecticut, the smell of freshly popped popcorn hits you immediately. That scent is quickly followed by the sight of the snack everywhere: flowing through machines, filling bins, and being scooped up by hands (gloved, of course) to steal a taste.

As we shared last week, the organic snack brand’s growth has been a slow burn, but the major aspect of the business that helped it achieve $100 million in sales and 35,000 points of distribution—actually, “the only way I could figure out how to keep it alive,” CEO Charles Coristine said—has been self-manufacturing.

Coristine guided Retail Brew through a tour of its factory to show us the journey from kernel to bag and share the unique processes that set its snacks apart.

Well-oiled machine: LesserEvil has gone through a few iterations and switched ownership, and therefore, the brand had a tricky time getting investors, Coristine noted. “We had to do everything on the cheap,” he said, piecing together its factory one machine at a time, often with used machines it refurbished. Now, he’s actually found that he prefers the popcorn made on those older, used machines rather than newer ones.

“Now we go and find these things and they’re like treasure,” he said. But not everything is old; Coristine also showed us a new twin screw extruder machine that he said cost $2.5 million, used for its Moonions, Space Balls, and Lil’ Puffs.

Each of its machines has a kernel type it works well with, so the company buys from three different suppliers, including Pennsylvania’s Reist Popcorn Company.

LesserEvil runs its popcorn machines slower than is customary—its 1,000-pounds-an-hour popper only runs at 600-pounds-an hour, he noted. This ensures the kernels pop at the end of the popper, which allows for a larger kernel expansion, creating a bigger and more delicate piece of popcorn. This method is known as multilateral expansion, creating a butterfly shape—a pop that’s more difficult to achieve than a more dense unilateral shape, Coristine noted. This type of pop is not only what he said tastes better, also makes for a fuller feeling bag, thus giving “a perception of a lot more value,” despite being a nearly identical weight compared to other brands.

After being popped, the popcorn is sprayed with a mixture of oil and seasoning (its Himalayan Pink Salt flavor gets 4–5 pounds of salt for every 100 pounds of coconut oil).

The popcorn is then lifted up into a scale that measures the exact serving size and drops it into bags, producing 21 bags per minute, according to Coristine.

Just the snacks: Half of the Danbury factory used to be its office space, but LesserEvil eventually relocated its office a few minutes down the road to make way for three additional production lines, Coristine said. Its new factory in New Milford “is a bit of a bigger jump,” he said, adding five production lines at once, including a 1,500-pound popcorn popper, and boosting its capacity by up to 40%. Those lines will be focused on packaging small bags and multi-packs to serve its Costco business, he said. The brand had previously hand-packed its small bags into multi-packs—“which is not all that efficient,” Coristine noted—before buying bagging equipment to do it automatically.

When we’re at the factory, we watch workers pack up its mini bags of Lil’ Puffs and its Himalayan Gold popcorn in Costco-sized bags (think the size of a small child). While its Himalayan Salt flavor competes directly with big players like Hershey-owned Skinnypop, its butter-flavored Himalayan Gold has given it particular success at Costco because “we don’t have to compete against anybody…it’s accretive to the category,” Coristine said.

LesserEvil employs about 280 people, largely factory workers, which Coristine pointed out are mostly women (“I can’t talk highly enough about them,” he said.). There’s also opportunities for them to rise in the ranks, as about eight employees now working in its office came from the factory, and a majority of the supervisors in the factory began as packers.

One person you’ll also always see in the factory is Coristine himself, who said he is “meticulous about product quality,” visiting three to four times a day, checking how fast the bags are running or whether the popcorn is too salty. He said product quality is one of his biggest passions, along with new product innovation, dreaming up new flavors like an oat milk latte-flavored popcorn and even putting his dog, Ivy, on the package for its new Moonions product.

“It’s all just a playground,” he said.