Doing Business : American Becomes Poland’s ‘Popcorn King’ in 3 Years : Now Tom Heanue struggles to keep up with the overheated market he created.
In less than three years, Tom Heanue, the Orville Redenbacher of Poland, has created a nation of popcorn munchers where corn was previously regarded as fit only for pig fodder.
Cashing in on the mystique of all things American here, the Yankee entrepreneur’s Indiana Popping Corn has become a bestseller in the land of sausage and potatoes.
Heanue, a former banker and restaurateur from White Horse Beach, Mass., started his business here with just $5,000 and a conviction that there wasn’t enough food in Eastern Europe to meet suppressed demand. He was working in a bank in Prague, Czechoslovakia, at the time.
Thinking back to weekend evenings in front of the family television set, where he and his seven siblings sat snacking on popcorn and watching Disney and Lassie, the 38-year-old caught the kernel of his idea.
And he took a word of advice from his mother, a nutrition expert: “She said popcorn will go over big because it’s nutritious and healthy but above all it’s just cheap.”
Heanue cheerfully admits he had no idea Poles regarded corn strictly as animal fodder. “If I’d known more then, I would never have come here,” he says at his Lodz packaging plant.
The company name, Indiana Foods, was the result of Heanue’s unique brand of market research. He made a list of the Midwestern states that produce popcorn seed and showed it to Polish cabbies.
“Indiana” was the only name they could pronounce, he said, and Heanue noted an association with Indiana Jones, the movie hero.
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So in 1991 he imported his first 44,000-pound container of popcorn seed--and found that no one wanted to buy it. So he went from store to store--often still run by unimaginative state managers--and demonstrated how to pop corn.
“Nine out of 10 store managers said, ‘Nobody will eat it,’ ” Heanue recalls. So he went straight to the consumer. He and a Polish actor set up popping demonstrations on street corners, handing out 100 pounds of popping corn at a go.
When he couldn’t afford a professional actor, Heanue donned a brown fedora and leather jacket to impersonate Indiana Jones in snappy television commercials. The slogan: “You no longer have to search the Earth to find popcorn.”
The next step was outright bribery of reluctant store managers: They would get a cut of the profits if they would just give Indiana Popping Corn shelf space in their stores. “They all understand money,” Heanue says with a grin.
Finally, his popcorn took off. “It sold very well,” says Ryszard Krub, deputy manager of the Rival Market in Poznan. “Customers didn’t have any problems with it because there are directions on each package.”
Indiana Popping Corn and Heanue’s other product, Kentucky Peanut Butter, went onto store shelves all over Poland--except Warsaw, where stores didn’t pay their bills.
Sales last year topped $1 million. They are expected to hit $2 million this year. That’s a lot of popcorn, because Heanue sells 15-ounce bags to stores for the equivalent of 18 cents (retail price: 25 cents).
“I’ve fed a lot of people,” Heanue says with pride.
But he also became a victim of his success. The market he created prompted “every guy in the country with an uncle in Chicago” to import popcorn. Poor-quality imitations flooded stores. Some counterfeiters even photocopied Indiana Popping Corn bags and taped the paper inside clear plastic bags.
Popcorn vendors turned up on street corners all over Poland. Movie theaters began selling it. Consumers quickly became blase about what had been a novelty.
“At first it was a rage, but current sales are low,” says Grazyna Jurewicz, manager of the Combi food store in Wroclaw. “It was fashionable, but now people prefer to buy ready-made popcorn out of laziness.”
Heanue, who expanded into the more profitable peanut butter to boost his profit margins, nevertheless is determined to keep up with the market he’s created.
He’s experimenting with cheese- and caramel-flavored popcorn and is considering producing microwave popcorn. “The market is maturing so fast, I’m having to scramble to keep up with it,” says the stocky Heanue, who looks like the hockey player he once was.
The need for a new gimmick dredged up another memory from childhood: Cracker Jack. Popcorn, peanuts . . . and a prize!
So he’s launching an “Indiana sends you to Indiana” campaign. Each popcorn package will come with a small Polish-English phrase booklet designed especially for Heanue by Indiana University. In addition, buyers will be eligible to win a trip to the university for a nine-week English course.
“Even if you don’t win the trip, you’re still winning because you’re learning English,” the ever-cheerful Heanue says.
Like most Western entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe, Heanue has run head-on into the bad habits of employees and distributors bred by nearly 50 years of communism.
“Not only do you have to do the business, but you have to teach everyone else how to do business with you. And after you teach them once, you have to teach them again,” he says. “You have to explain absolutely everything.”
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But he’s optimistic about the future and has an ambitious five-year plan to distribute his products to Russia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. German, Japanese and American investors have expressed interest in buying into Indiana Foods, he says.
“I couldn’t start this company today,” he says. “I would have to have half a million to $1 million if I was going to come here now and do what I’m doing, with the distribution, information and contacts with stores and goodwill.”
And Heanue remains grateful to Poland for the opportunities it’s given him: “I could never have done this in the U.S.”
