BoxOffice® Pro - May 2012

SNACK
TIME
The State of the Popcorn Industry
CONCESSION PROGRESSION
by Annlee Ellingson
Since 1885, C. CRETORS & COMPANY has designed and manufactured the popcorn
poppers that are at the center of movie theater concessions. The company’s
125th anniversary party in 2010 was really a celebration of the birth of the concessions
industry itself, as Charles Cretors’ creation of a multi-snack cart for the 1893
Columbian Exposition marked the introduction of one of the world’s first concession
stands. And at CinemaCon, Shelly Olesen, Cretors’ vice president of sales and marketing,
will be honored with the 2012 Bert Nathan Memorial Award, which recognizes
leadership and significant accomplishment in theater concessions. BOXOFFICE
recently chatted with company president Andrew Cretors and his father, CEO Charlie
Cretors, about popcorn trends, environmentally friendly concessions developments
and what’s kept them in business for one and a quarter centuries.
One of the things that’s notable about Cretors
is that you’ve stuck to the basics—popcorn,
nacho cheese, hot dogs. Why has that
been a smart business model for Cretors?
Charlie Cretors: My dad and I were both
engineers, and we built things that worked. To
a certain extent, we weren’t businessmen who
went out to create and grow businesses. We
kind of built a better mousetrap and people
came to our door, but we didn’t build rattraps.
We built our mousetraps, and we did pretty
good with them. And now it’s beginning to be
a necessity to start expanding. But I think the
basics are do what you do well and focus on it.
I did not try to grow the business. Some people
will say that’s a fault, but it was my nature, so
that’s what I did, and I’d say that’s how at least
for the last 50 or 60 years—going back to my
dad, going back to the ’40s after the war—that’s
the way he ran it too.
You said that you
“built a better mouse-
trap.” What makes a better mousetrap?
Charlie: Our popcorn machines were the main
focus, and that was
really the only thing we
did up until I came to the company in about
1970 when I brought in the industrial popcorn
machines, which were the big ones. Today,
those machines go
up to 5,000 pounds an hour.
They’re huge industrial machines. But again, it
was always focused
on popcorn. Our industrial
sales guy sells a lot
of machinery that goes into
continuous fluidized-bed ovens, and they’re
used for lots of different cereals and snacks, but
my focus was just on popcorn machines.
It’s only recently, the last 10 years, when
salespeople have come to me and said,
“We need this, we need that.” And
then I focused my attention on that.
I’m more
an engineer than I am a
businessman. I can build an awful lot
of different things, and if salespeople
brought in new ideas, then suddenly
we would move into a new market
because I’d develop the machines and
they did the sales.
CHARLIE
CRETORS
AND HIS
SIGNATURE
CORN
It seems like that model served
you well, at least up to a cer-
tain point.
Charlie: Yes, it made us very solid
and stable, but it didn’t give us a
huge amount of growth.
Are there plans for expansion into other
areas?
Andrew Cretors: Yeah, and that’s kind of I
58 BOXOFFICE PRO MAY 2012