Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Echavarria.
Hi Joshua, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started making kettle corn in a skillet with a lid back when I was a teenager. It was ok, but the lid with no holes doesn’t let any of the steam out allowing the kettle corn to get nice and crunchy. Fast forward a few years after I got married I started making our cinnamon kettle corn in 2001 in our apartment in Modesto, CA. I finally bought a Whirley Pop and popping way better kettle corn on the stove. I really love cinnamon, and you can never find cinnamon kettle corn so I started making my own. Took several attempts to get it correct but finally got it down, Cinnamon Kettle Corn was born! Found soybean oil hurt my stomach when having too much so I started using coconut oil. Using coconut oil makes it taste way better and most other kettle corn you’ll get at venues are made with soybean or corn oil, not the healthiest options but it is much cheaper to produce your product. Over the years I have tweaked the original recipe to where it is today.
From 2001 to 2020 I only made it for our family and I would pop a bunch to hand out to neighbors as holiday gifts. Prior to 2020 my wife kept asking me to turn it into a business as it is really good and people always asked for it. I continued to push it aside as I already had a good job and put in quite a bit of overtime so there was not a lot of time to spend on it. Then came 2020, the Covid era. Was still at the same job but didn’t put in a lot of overtime anymore. My wife brought it up again, this time I didn’t say no. I started making sample bags and handing them out to a bunch of coworkers to see what they thought. Everyone loved it! So then came the process of getting our cottage license so we could legally sell our product. Labeling took quite a bit of work, more than I thought it would be with all the requirements of the font sizes and data required on it. Then came the nutrition labels, that was another process to get that started. Registering our business with the state of Utah, finding bags that would look nice, labels we wanted to put on the finished product, the font we wanted to use for the business, getting a business line, customized email, a website that is still not setup and running, and dog gates to block off the kitchen when I am cooking.
From 2020 to 2022 everything was done in the kitchen. One pop on the stove would only fill 1.5 bags. So a 150-200 bag order would take a good 9 hours of work doing it by myself. That was just the first process. In the beginning my wife would put custom bows on every single bag. That added even more hours to the product. But the finished product looked very good, my wife is very crafty. Started selling our product to coworkers and a little boutique we would have in our credit union at work during Halloween and Christmas time. Eventually some companies would purchase a large amount to hand out to their customers during the holidays in Grantsville, UT and Park City, UT. Friends and family would purchase a lot during the holidays to hand out as stocking stuffers and neighbor gifts. Was eventually getting too much to keep popping in our kitchen. By myself I could do about 16 bags an hour, then I started paying my kids to help then we got up to 30 bags a hour. During this time I also started doing an Original kettle corn, the ones you normally would buy from a vendor at an event. Except, ours was made with coconut oil and sea salt, quite more expensive than the products other vendors use to make their corn. We started doing small events, pre-popping and boxing them all to take to events. Risky thing to do if you don’t sell out you have a lot of product left and it only lasts so long, usually 2 months within Utah. This process still kept us out of the large events, there was no way I could pop that much inventory and take it to an event in my Excursion. So in 2022 we borrowed from our house and bought a trailer and all the equipment needed to pop at an event. Now we could keep up with the volume of a large crowd. Then the issue is finding a good event that has a lot of foot traffic to be able to sell to. We have done a lot of events where the turn out is not as it was expected. Sometimes we lose money on an event with all of our costs and paying our helpers. Normal cost of doing business processes.
Ran the business with the full setup from 2022 to 2023 in Utah on the side of my full time job. Then in October 2023 my career job of 23.5 years decided to do a RIF and I was laid off. Using coconut oil comes with its drawbacks, Utah is cold, coconut oil is solid when it is cold. Trying to scoop out solid coconut oil is not an easy task when it is solid. I would sit the containers in the sun to try liquify it, but when the sun was gone it starts solidifying again. I didn’t have a way of keeping it liquid when the cold months came around and in Utah no events are going on during the winter months that I could pop outside. We use propane to fire the kettle so I cannot use it indoors at events. Was not finding any jobs from October 2023 to December, we made the hard decision to put our home up for sale before we lost it since I did not have a job. My sister lived in Texas so we decided to start looking in Texas for jobs as homes in Utah had gotten too expensive. Took from December 2023 to June of 2024 to sell our home as still no jobs were found in Utah. So the house was sold and we moved to The Woodlands Texas, still with no job on the horizon. Was still having no luck finding any jobs in Texas so we decided to just run our kettle corn business full time. Got the business all setup in Texas and started hitting some small events then we landed a lease with HEB in Magnolia, TX and started selling our product full time Tuesday-Saturday.
We still just offered Cinnamon and Original kettle corn until mid 2024. My wife went to her aunts house in Utah and she brought home some freeze dried strawberries. We all love strawberries so why not try it. Took a bunch and blended them up in our blender to make a powder. Took several attempts and then our Freeze Dried Strawberry Kettle Corn was born. Blueberries are another fruit we like so not too long after we released our Strawberry flavor we released our Blueberry Kettle Corn. Our landlord suggested putting Tajin on the kettle corn. I started working on a Tajin kettle corn and eventually released our Tajin flavor. It was good but still not my type of kettle corn. Then one day I was in a Kroger grocery store and saw they have a habanero Tajin seasoning by the fruit section. I like spicy food, so, why not try it. This one took quite a few attempts to get down. Sugar seems to tame the heat so I had to really cut down on my base sugar mixture to allow the heat to still be tasted. The Habanero Tajin has been a really good product, people are sad when we don’t have it in stock. Our habanero Tajin is sweet and a little spicy, just the right amount of spicy so it is not burning your mouth even though there are habanero’s in it. Then we wanted to get into pickle festivals as there are a lot here in Texas but we needed a pickle kettle corn to be able to get in. So then we created a spicy pickle kettle corn so we could attend those events. I HATE pickles so that was one I really didn’t want to create. But I had to make one and my wife is the taste tester for that product. Once I had the recipe down she told me when it was good, haha.
Our products are in Marlo Miller Boutique, she carries our Cinnamon, Original and Habanero Tajin. We have not released any other flavors for wholesale just yet. But we found out the hard way our current bags did not last two months here in Texas due to humidity. She had to throw away 52 bags since they went bad. We have since then changed our packaging to zipper sealed bags that we also heat seal. We are still running longevity testing but we should be able to hit 6 months of shelf life. Our products do not have any preservatives in them to keep them lasting longer and will never add them. We just keep it to kernels, coconut oil, sea salt, Saigon cinnamon, Freeze Dried Strawberries, Freeze Dried Blueberries. The Tajin and pickle recipes have a little more in them since we by the mixtures already made but they dont have preservatives in them.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Has not always been a smooth road. Hitting shows that we do not have much foot traffic causes us to lose money. We had to end our lease with HEB, that location the foot traffic slowed down to the point were we could not afford to keep paying the lease and bills. Some events are so expensive to get into it prices us out to be able to join. Some events can easily run $2k just to get into the event or an event will make you pay a high price to get in and 24% or more of your sales on top of the entrance fee’s. We are struggling right now since we dont have a daily place to sell and I still haven’t found a job in Texas. Just started applying again for the past few months, still no bites so we just find events when we can to sell at. We also have customers call us and pickup product from the house.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Before I started doing kettle corn I worked in the medical device field, I have my AS in electronics. I started out in Palo Alto California working on linear accelerators for cancer treatment machines at Varian Medical Systems. First starting at that company I lived 90 miles away and commuted to work everyday from Modesto California. Day shift took me 3 hours to get to work and 3 hours to get home everyday. I did that for 6 months before I switched to swing shift. Still the same distance but the travel time cut down to 1.5hrs each way. Traffic in the Bay Area in 2000 was horrendous. I did that for a couple of years until it started hurting my body being in the car all the time. So we ate the double rent and moved to Palo Alto. Sold our second car and I was close enough to work to walk or ride my bike. If the weather was bad my wife drove me. We then eventually were able to buy a condo in Easy Palo Alto and lived there for 10 months before we moved to Utah. I was able to transfer to the Varian Medical Systems in Utah working on digital flat panels for X-ray. These panels are the ones when you get an X-ray it allows it to pop up on a computer screen. I started out testing the detectors there in Salt Lake City. I caught on very fast and moved into the repair department. It as just two of us in the repair department for awhile. Eventually I was the main guy for the RMA department. I was in the RMA department from 2006 to 2023. Dealing with customers and issuing quotes for the repairs. Helping with repairs when I had the time between managing the team, and all the other duties I handled. Most proud of all the knowledge I gained working and testing the detectors and customer relations I gain. Being in the higher position really helped me with managing a team.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Never giving up. I always find a way to move to the next step. It might take awhile like it is now but eventually I excel and keep moving forward.
Pricing:
- $8 for any flavor
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.cinnafreak.com
- Instagram: @cinnafreak
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cinnafreak
