Orville Redenbacher Biography

White-haired, skinny and bow-tied, Orville Redenbacher was the folksy TV pitchman for Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn for nearly two decades.

Orville Redenbacher was “born on a small corn farm in Indiana,” according to his company’s biography, and he earned an agronomy degree from Purdue University in 1928. Redenbacher had a lifelong interest in popcorn, and while he became rich running a fertilizer company, he also experimented with thousands of corn hybrids, looking for one which would pop up lighter and fluffier than typical popcorn.

By the 1960s he was selling popcorn out of the back of his car, and in 1971 he introduced Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn. When the goofy, gangly Redenbacher began to appear in TV ads for his popcorn, sales went through the roof.

Redenbacher sold the company to corporate giant Hunt-Wesson in 1976, and it then became part of ConAgra in 1990, but Orville continued on as spokesman for the brand until 1995, often appearing in TV commercials with his grandson, Gary. In 1984 he published Orville Redenbacher’s Popcorn Book. After his death in 1995, Time magazine called Redenbacher “the Luther Burbank of popcorn.”