Hop on the Pop Trend

How do you take popcorn beyond the movie theater and microwave and make it the new must-eat food? If you’re Maddy & Maize popcorn, you create unexpected flavors like coconut curry, apple pie à la mode and bourbon barbecue. (Not convinced? Try it; you’ll be a believer.)

The St. Paul-based gourmet popcorn company, which uses mostly local ingredients to create its 11 seasonally rotating flavors, is a fun choice for reception popcorn bars or favor bags. In fact, it was a wedding that inspired one of founder and CEO Brett Striker’s first flavors, lemon raspberry layer cake.

“My cousin had a lemon raspberry cake at her wedding, and I wanted to turn it into popcorn,” Striker says.

It was a hit. Striker started spending his free time in his apartment kitchen experimenting and creating surprising—but still delicious—flavor combinations.

“I thought it’d be fun to create crazy flavors of popcorn that hadn’t been done,” he says.

Besides the tantalizing taste, Maddy & Maize popcorn looks downright delightful. The lemon raspberry layer cake is a pretty pink, the dark chocolate caramel is drizzled with chocolate and the birthday cake is coated with rainbow sprinkles (made from vegetable juice and vegan white chocolate, no less—no gross ingredients here).

Ready to bring popcorn to your big day? Favor-size boxes are available on the website, but Striker suggests that couples go through their caterers and venues to buy in bulk. Maddy & Maize, maddyandmaize.com