Planning a popcorn bar and trying to figure out how much popcorn you need to buy.

• how much popcorn will each guest eat?
• how much popcorn to buy?
• where to buy popcorn & what type?
• how to serve popcorn?

how much popcorn will each guest eat?

There is no exact way to know how much popcorn each guest will eat. However the best way to guess is how much you think they will eat based on how much other food that is being served at the party. At a movie night popcorn bar guests may go back multiple times for popcorn but at a wedding with a full three course meal, guests may only have room for one serving if any at all.

Popcorn Servings = Number of Guests x (1.25 – 3.0)

• x 1.25 Lots of other food available at the event. If there is already a full meal being served and the popcorn is just a snack, most guests probably won’t have more than one serving and some may not have any. But in my opinion this is the bare minimum, you may want to multiply by 1.5 or 1.75.
• x 2 Probably some other food being served at the party/event but the popcorn is part of the menu.
• x 3 The popcorn is the main food being served at the event. For a movie night, you want your guests to be able to come back for 2nds or 3rds.

how much popcorn to buy

Now that you have the number of servings you need, you can determine how much popcorn you need to buy. This is a simple chart based on a 2 cup serving, showing how much popped popcorn you will need.

# Servings	Serving Size (Cups)	Popped Popcorn Needed (Cups)
100	2	200
200	2	400
300	2	600

Here a popcorn calculator, which will help you determine how many cups or gallons of popped popcorn you will need. It also breaks it down to how many cups or ounces of popcorn kernels you will need if you will be popping the popcorn yourself.

Now you have the number of cups of popcorn you need but many times popcorn in sold by the weight. Frustrating, I know, but you may get lucky and they will tell you approximately how many cups are in the container.

If not you will have to guess the best you can. Just with Google I found that 1 cup of popped popcorn weighs from .28 to 2.24 ounces. That is quite a big range. I measured some pre-popped salted popcorn I had in my pantry and one cup weighed .7 ounces. I think the variance in how much a cup of popcorn weighs maybe do to how much butter, oil and salt is on the popcorn.

A few companies on Amazon who offered large bags of pre-popped popcorn listed how many cups are in their bags and they were in the .28 – .3 ounces her cup range. It sounds like a small difference but with a 56 ounce bag, if one cup is .28 ounces you will get 200 cups of popcorn. If we go by .7 ounces weight per cup, you only get 80 cups of popcorn from the same 56 ounce bag.

Unfortunately I don’t have a good solution to this problem. I definitely suggest if you can’t speak with the company you are ordering popcorn from, over estimate and get more than you may need. Better to have extra than not enough.

popcorn kernels or pre-popped popcorn

Determining whether you need popcorn kernels or pre-popped popcorn depends on if you want to pop it yourself or prefer to have it already popped. My choice is pre-popped unless you are renting or happen to own a popcorn machine, like the ones you see at carnivals or the movie theaters. Normally at home I use an air popper to pop my own popcorn, which I tried to do for a party. Well I popped bowl after bowl the day before the party and packed it all away in zip-lock bags. A few hours later, that same day I tasted the popcorn and it was already going stale. So I tossed it all out and ran to the store and bought a giant bag of pre-popped popcorn. Frustrating but I definitely learned by lesson, that I prefer pre-popped popcorn.

Now you can do an air popper if you plan to run it during the party. You will probably need to assign someone to run it. Some things to consider, they usually only make a bowl full at a time, usually loud, and may need cooling down time between bowls. I don’t have one to recommend, mine is really old but most stores that carry small kitchen appliances will have them or of course Amazon, they usually run $20-25.

Another option is to buy or rent a popcorn machine for your popcorn bar. I haven’t tried a popcorn machine yet so I don’t have any advice to offer on this option. However just from the few home-model popcorn machines I’ve seen on the market, I think I would be more inclined to rent one. It just seems like with a rental it would hopefully be a higher quality machine and you avoid having to store it.

My favorite option is to buy pre-popped popcorn. I prefer not to have to deal with running a machine or an air-popper during a party. The question is where to buy the pre-popped popcorn.

where to buy popcorn

I think the best option to buy popped popcorn if you decide to go that route, would be to find a local popcorn company in your area and talk to to them to see if they could provide you with fresh popped popcorn for the day of your party.

Another option and the one I had to use last minute was buying it from a grocery store. At least at the grocery stores in my area, they only sold what they call party sized bags that feed a couple people. However I did find a giant party sized bag at Smart and Final, which was great.

You can also buy popcorn online. There are gourmet and specialty popcorn stores online. And of course Amazon carries pre-popped popcorn too.

If you decide to use a popcorn machine or an air-popper, you can find popcorn kernels pretty much anywhere, almost any grocery store carries them and they are usually pretty inexpensive.

Serving Popcorn at your popcorn bar

The last thing to think about is how to serve the popcorn to your guests. Especially when setting up a popcorn bar, but this is the fun party. You will need some baskets/ buckets so the guests can scoop their own popcorn and something for them to eat it out of like popcorn bags.

In my shop I have wood slat popcorn baskets and metal buckets to serve the popcorn and a variety of paper bags for each guest to create their own popcorn creation. This shows how much popcorn each item holds.

Knowing how much popcorn you will be serving based on the number of guests and how much you think everyone will eat, you can better determine the size buckets or baskets you need to serve your guests. If you are planning on 200 popcorn servings, you know you will need 200 popcorn bags, 400 cups of popcorn and if you using three 8 quart popcorn baskets, you will still need to fill them each a little more than 4 times.

Example: 400 popcorn cups / (32 cups per basket x 3 baskets) = 4.2x each basket will need to be filled

As you can see from this example you will most likely need someone to keep refilling the popcorn baskets for you. If you are busying hosting maybe a family member or a friend wouldn’t mind keeping an eye out on keeping these baskets full for you.

One last tip, if you are using pre-popped popcorn for your popcorn bar. Keep the bags sealed until you are ready to use them. In my opinion popcorn goes stale pretty quickly and fresh popcorn is so much better