As Jonas Tempel pops out, Patrick Yee pops in.
Tempel, the founder and CEO of the flavored popcorn company Opopop, will fully hand over the reins of his company at the end of this year to Patrick Yee, the former chief marketing officer of the website Refinery29 and frozen food firm Daily Harvest.
Yee began working as a consultant for Opopop in April and became CEO in July. Tempel has been in a “very soft dismount” from the company since then.
“My run has been focused on fundraising, brand and production development,” Tempel said. “I’m handing that whole stack to Patrick to go beyond (direct to consumer) into broader retail channels.”
Tempel started Englewood-based Opopop in 2021. He has built out an online, direct-to-consumer model that he said will make over $7 million in revenue this year.
Opopop kernels are wrapped in flavors such as Super Butter, Cinnalicious and Maui Heat, so they come out of the microwave popped and already seasoned. Tempel said Opopop is the only company on the market using the technology.
“We are a flavor house,” Tempel said. “The only thing our competitors have is salt.”
Opopop sells an 11.3-ounce bag of kernels for $17 or $18, depending on the flavor. For comparison, a six-pack of Orville Redenbacher popcorn, which is 19.74 ounces, goes for $4 at Target.
“We’re expensive, but it’s because we use real ingredients. (Other companies) don’t give a crap about popcorn,” Tempel said.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” Yee said.
Other Opopop product options include a more snackable version dubbed the Pop Cup, which holds a smaller portion in a peel-and-pour setup and comes in a $17 three-pack, and product bundles for skeptical first-time or gift-givers that range from $50 to $325.
He and Yee hope to replace Orville Redenbacher and other companies that have dominated the space for decades. They also see the entertainment business as a fertile market and hope to bring in studios, actors and directors to help with marketing.
“It’s about getting to people where they are already,” Yee said. At Daily Harvest, he helped the frozen-food brand triple in size as it landed in grocery stores across America.
Since September, Opopop has been in Meijer grocery stores across six Midwestern states, Yee said. This is the first time Opopop has been sold in a brick-and-mortar store, though it made about $500,000 in revenue this past year from wholesale deals with Williams Sonoma and Pop Up Grocers.
“We’re not trying to knock down every distribution door we can right away,” Yee said. “We’re just learning how to market it.”
Going direct-to-consumer was not Opopop’s original plan. The company initially intended to target businesses, and to become an office staple through a patented popcorn machine optimized for its flavor-wrapped kernels. But the COVID-19 pandemic changed those plans, and the success of the online model suggests the business can be scaled up.
Yee and Tempel expect to sign several deals with retail stores next year and to see revenue grow more than the roughly 20 percent average it has done each of the last three years. During that time, they have shipped to just under 200,000 customers and garnered a gluttony of data on everything from regional flavor preferences to buying times.
The average customer buys kernels every 28 days, they said, all of which are manufactured in Opopop’s 12,000-square-foot headquarters in Englewood.
They usually ship about 1,000 orders a week during regular business months, but during a five-week stretch around the holidays, that number balloons to 15,000. Tempel said Opopop makes 65 percent to 70 percent of its revenue during this stretch, and they expand their staff from 20 to 30 people to account for the uptick.
Opopop also recently raised over $2 million, mainly through the Chicago-based Valor Siren Ventures, which is backed by Starbucks and has contributed a significant chunk of the $14 million total the company has raised.
“It’s not a huge round,” Tempel said. “It’s just about shoring this business up for the next step.”
Next year, Tempel will remain on the business’s board while going to work full time for Alfa, the creative agency he founded in early 2023 as an offshoot of Opopop. He did Opopop’s website production, photography and design in-house — his areas of expertise, he said — and other companies asked if he could do the same for them.
Tempel is currently advising three startups on their branding.
“The product is really good, and we have a great brand foundation,” Yee said.
Full story via BusinessDen
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