Bric simpson was a genuine movie buff: He hit the theater about five times a month. That also made him attuned to the finer points of snacking, and he had some problems. “You pay a premium price for popcorn, but they only butter the top layer. An inch down, you’ve got almost a whole bucket of popcorn that tastes like cardboard,” he says. In 2009, Simpson and his wife were shaking a popcorn bucket to distribute the butter when she said, “You know what we need? A lid.”
Today, Simpson has made that lid — along with a company, Kernel King, that sells about 100,000 of them a month nationwide. But the process wasn’t easy. He had to juggle his business while working full-time for the Army National Guard, and he needed to figure out how to break into the largely change-averse theater industry. But now that he has, Simpson’s next goal is a big one: He wants his lid to be as ubiquitous as movie popcorn itself.
Simpson had always loved the idea of running his own business. His wife’s lid suggestion seemed like the perfect opportunity — but rather than spending time on a design or a manufacturing plan, one of his first moves was contacting a patent lawyer. “We were worried that somebody would see the idea and say, ‘Hey, this is something we should do,’” says Simpson. The patent lawyer couldn’t find any competing patents, and he told Simpson that with a unique enough lid, he shouldn’t have any trouble patenting it.
In late 2011, Simpson began sketching lids and creating prototypes with a local machine shop. He added vents so hot popcorn doesn’t get soggy. He tested variously sized domes for optimal butter distribution. (“We decided on our current height based on best shakability,” he says.) Width had to be perfect, to snap onto the most popular manufacturers’ buckets. And he added a handle — making it easy for employees to lift the lids out of display cases,…