MORE THAN THIS
“Although the name of the company would suggest that we just sell popcorn,” he asserts, “we are now so much more than that.”
Employing 22 people in Mississauga and another eight full-time workers at a smaller, 3,000-square-foot operation in Ottawa, Poppa Corn processes and packages over 42,000 pounds of raw popcorn weekly, reveals Cousineau, who more or less stumbled into the popcorn business back in 1996 after deciding he had enough of selling office equipment in the Ottawa-Hull region.
“I wanted to find something simple to do, something fun, and so I started selling popcorn to retail businesses in the Ottawa area,” says Cousineau, recalling the early days of starting up Poppa Corn Ottawa and partnering up with the Mississauga-based Super-Pufft Snacks Corporation to distribute its products in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) region.
Photo by Sandra Strangemore
“Well, it might have been fun, but it sure wasn’t easy,” he recounts. “Everybody loves popcorn, but it’s just not one of those items that people tend to pick up regulary at a convenience store. “You can have 20 or more people purchasing a bag of chips before even one person buys a bag of popcorn.
“That’s when I decided that I needed a change of plans,” relates Cousineau, citing his 1998 purchase of Canadian distribution rights to the long-enduring Lucky Elephant Pink Candy Popcorn brand as a defining moment in getting his business onto a new, more promising growth path.
Launched in Canada way back in the early 1940s, this iconic brand—a kid-friendly popcorn treat sweetened with a pink candy coating—became a perennial staple at Canadian neighborhood food outlets and mom-and-pop grocery stores, in large part
thanks to giveaway prizes contained in each and every 70-gram paperbox.
While the Lucky Elephant brand still enjoys widespread market penetration to this day—with the Pickering, Ont.-headquartered Ellis Packaging Limited nowadays supplying the folding cartons and Sandylion Sticker Designs of Markham, Ont., providing the colorful sheets of stickers inserted inside the boxes—the present-day Poppa Corn has vastly expanded the overall scope of its business since then.
Photo by Sandra Strangemore
“We now have well over 200 SKUs (stock-keeping units) that we handle as a distributor,” says Cousineau, citing the company’s hard-earned reputation for keen customer service and high product quality for its continued growth—even during the recent economic downturn.
“We focus our business mostly in Ontario, but we also have distributors for our products out in western Canada,” says Cousineau, adding that he still maintains close business ties with Super-Pufft Snacks.
“By 2000, my partners at Super-Pufft wanted to concentrate solely on manufacturing, so in 2002 I arranged to move the concession portion of Super-Pufft into another facility here in Mississauga just down the street from them, which I named Poppa Corn Corp.,” he explains.
“I still purchase popped popcorn from them, which I further process by adding coatings to flavor the popcorn, like the pink candy coating for Lucky Elephant, which we then package for sale throughout Canada.”
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