Today we’d like to introduce you to Patience Felt and Steve Bivans.
Hi Patience and Steve, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
“I want a little popcorn cart that’s cute,” Paysh said.
“Okay?” I said, distracted by something on my phone, and not completely awake, although I’d been up for a couple hours writing. We were sitting in the back room eating breakfast.
“Did you even hear what I said?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said without looking up.
I felt the heat on my face. You know what I mean: the heat from your significant when you aren’t really paying attention and they’re boring a hole in the side of your head with heat-vision.
I removed my head from my phone. I even put it down. “Sorry,” I said. “What?”
Paysh shook her head. “I said, I want to run a little popcorn cart and sell popcorn.”
“Cool,” I smiled. “Why?”
“Because popcorn makes everyone happy, unlike my job…”
Paysh’s job is corporate, and stressful, and she has to deal with a lot of rich, spoiled, brats. ‘Bout all I can say about it…
I (Steve Bivans) am a writer with too much formal education and a work history akin to a sawed off shotgun blast. It’s all over the place. If you can name it, and it pays next to nothing, I’ve probably done it.
For the last 6 years, I’ve also been the manager of our neighborhood farmers market, the West Side Farmers Market, in St. Paul, Minnesota. As Paysh described her little popcorn cart, I could envision it sitting at the market. I could smell it, too. It would be the perfect addition.
“Popcorn makes me happy, that’s for sure,” I said. We eat a lot of popcorn at our house.
“Do you think it could make enough money, eventually, to retire on?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t really know, but my mind was already working on it, calculating and imagining standing on a street corner, or at the market, selling bags of popcorn. “Why not?” That’s my standard response. I’m a gambler. Not really, but I will take a calculated risk long before most people.
“I want to call it Payshee’s Popcorn,” she said.
It was a brilliant name, and I’m good at naming stuff. It also had alliteration and a built in story. Aunt Payshee is what her nieces call her. And everyone in the family loves her popcorn.
And that’s how Payshee’s Popcorn began, a conversation over breakfast one morning.
We planned, at first, to put the whole thing on a pull-behind trailer, but due to the constraints of our vehicle, we then looked for other options.
Eventually, and I’m really condensing the story here, we had to abandon the cart/truck idea and open the business under Minnesota’s Cottage Food Law. Basically, it allows mom n pop food businesses to start up in their own kitchen. But we’d have to pop all of it ahead of time, pre-bag it, then take those bags to the farmers market on Saturday mornings to sell. Not what we originally wanted to do, but at least we could get started.
So we did that, for two years!
People loved the popcorn. We started with ‘tossed’ flavors: Easy Cheesy au Gratin, West Side Taco, The Classic (butter/salt), and a funky one Payshee named Herby Flurby (vegan, with olive oil, nutritional yeast, and herbs).
Then we made and sold her caramel corn for the holidays, which we still do. We offered two flavors the first two years: our St. Paul Holiday Suite (caramel and Easy Cheesy) and December Decadence (with gluten free pretzel pieces, drizzled with organic, free-trade, dark and white chocolate).
2020 was a challenging year for us. We actually took most of it off, until autumn, when we decided it was time to ‘go big’ or ‘stay home’. We purchased our 160 quart kettlecorn machine and applied for our MN Seasonal Temporary Food Stand license. So the dream of finally popping corn LIVE could be realized.
Since the spring of 2021, we’ve been doing just that! We started at the West Side Farmers Market, where we still pop. In August, we landed a spot at the epic, Irish Fair of Minnesota, a three day event. It was a gauntlet, but thanks to friends and family (Payshee’s POParazzi) we did really well. We also were invited to pop for two of St Paul Parks’s ‘Movies in the Park’ events in October.
We have been improving our website, www.paysheespopcorn.com, and for the first time ever, are offering online orders and shipping for the holidays this year! We take preorders, and then ship them out, or let people pick them up in early December.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
None of it has been smooth, lol.
It seems like every week, or month, a new obstacle or challenge presents itself
Our biggest challenge was just getting started: all the problems with the trailer idea, then could we put it on a golf cart, and then on the back of our Polaris GEM truck. The Dept of Ag kiboshed the idea. Thankfully, as we learned the first year that the popcorn machine we were using would never have kept up with demand at a live event.
One of the biggest challenges came at the beginning of our second season, in May of 2019.
Our countertop machine (the one we were using at the time) died about 50 bags into a planned 200 bag session, our biggest ever.
The next day was the annual Cinco de Mayo festival in St. Paul, on the West Side, our neighborhood. It’s one of the biggest in the country, thousands upon thousands of attendees, and we were dead in the water.
It was to be the opening day of the second season of Payshee’s Popcorn. We had a primo spot, in the parking lot of Wabasha Brewing, our neighborhood brewery. It was a sweet gig, especially since the entire event had been moved several blocks to just outside the door of the brewery. Beer, popcorn, and tacos: does it really get any better than that?
But now, the machine was dead, and we were dead in the water…
My mind was awash with dread. What the hell are we gonna do? I thought.
Payshee ran to her laptop in the office and began to look for a solution while I cursed and spat, and stomped around the kitchen as if my remonstrations would fix the machine without touching it. The machine just stared back at me, and scoffed. We are so Feeeeped! Was all I could think. Our entire season is sunk! My mind was spinning out of control.
“Can we rent one?” I yelled into the office.
“I don’t know!” she yelled back at me. To say we’d lost our composure would be an understatement. We were headed for a complete meltdown. She typed away at the keyboard. I flipped the switches on the machine, on, off, on, off.
Nothing.
Somewhere in my mind, my survival instincts kicked in enough to sit my butt down in my office chair and click away at my own laptop. I found a company that rented popcorn machines. I dialed the number—actually I just tapped the digital buttons on my iPhone. Does anyone under 50 even remember dials? But their machine was less than half the capacity of our own, would cost us nearly $100—there go the profits—and would probably waste a couple hours just to go get it, set it up and get it going.
“Damn it!” I cursed. I said a few other words, too. Living with me is akin to living on a wharf, with the stevedores and sailors. I’m not apologizing; I’m just stating a fact. My head was about to explode.
“We’re screwed!” I cursed some more. The fear of failure hit me. There’s nothing we can do!, I thought. And then something in me snapped, or clicked. It made some kind of breaking sound, sort of like the crushing of a tin can (another old person reference). Then my mind was clear. To hell with that! I thought. My mama didn’t raise no quitter! There, in that moment, my mind stopped racing. I clenched my jaw. My nostrils flared.
I sprang up out of my office chair and turned to Payshee. “We’re not giving up this easily.”
I marched into the kitchen, opened up the cabinet over the counter and yanked out our Relief Pitcher: our trusty old, Whirly Pop popper. You know, the old fashioned popcorn popper with the lid and the handle with the spinner thingy on it. I’d bought it for Paysh a couple years before to replace the old stock pot she used to use.
I dropped the thing onto the stovetop, turned to Payshee and said, “Start poppin’ mama! There’s no Fleepin way we’re quitting. If it takes all night, we’re gonna pop the rest of these bags.”
And we did. With the help of our good friend, Momo, who showed up just moments later, and the trusty old Whirly Pop, we managed to pop another 100 bags! One. At. A. Time.
We made it to Cinco de Mayo, and it was a smashing success.
We had crushed Failure.
Why? Simply because we refused to quit.
No matter how long we continue on this popcorn journey, we will always look back to that day, our worst day, as our best day. Because the difference between a worst day, and a best day, has nothing to do whatsoever with what happens TO YOU.
It has only to do with how you respond. Will you quit? Will you roll over? Will you die? Or will you spit in Fear’s eye, call your Momo, grab your Magic Bowl, fire up your Whirly Pop, and get your ass to poppin’?
We’ve been impressed with Payshee’s Popcorn, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We are a micro food business in St. Paul, MN, on the West Side (a.k.a, Best Side).
We have been in business since 2018, and we make popcorn.
From the beginning, we wanted to stand apart from any other popcorn company.
We strive to make the best popcorn we can make because that’s what WE want to eat, and we try to do that without breaking the bank.
ORGANIC when Possible, Natural Always.
Our ultimate dream is to serve only organic ingredients. We are always striving to reach that goal.
We pop certified organic popcorn, only.
We don’t want to eat chemicals, and we figure you don’t, either. We pop it in organic, virgin, unrefined, cold-pressed Coconut Oil. We think it tastes better, and quite frankly, buttery.
For salt, we use Pink Himalayan Salt (for most of our flavors), because it is cleaner than any other salt on the planet (having been oceanic salt long before the invention of plastic). We also use Isabel Street Heat’s Habanero Salt for our West Side Taco and Notcho Mama flavors.
For our kettle corn flavors we use, mainly, organic cane sugar, though for some (like our Punkin’s Spiced Kettle Corn and holiday caramel corn) we also use non-organic, non-gmo light brown sugar. We have yet to find a reasonable alternative. We’re still working on it.
We know of no other popcorn company on the planet with the standards we hold. We’ve looked; they just aren’t out there.
We believe better ingredients make better popcorn. We hope you’ll try us, and agree. Then tell all your friends!
You can find us, during the summer, frequently at the West Side Farmers Market, and other events around St Paul.
We also CATER! We offer catering packages for all kinds of events (weddings, graduation parties, corporate events), ranging from a Popcorn Bar to us popping on site.
You can find us at www.paysheespopcorn.com, on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.paysheespopcorn.com
- Instagram: @paysheespopcorn
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paysheespopcorn
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaysheeP
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmA8zWbJzdnqIfK8vlCK2bg
Image Credits
Steve Bivans
Patience Felt
