Popcorn Trivia
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98 free Popcorn trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Popcorn is the rare snack with a genuinely deep back story. Kernels were being popped in Peru nearly 7,000 years ago, a Chicago candy-store owner invented the steam-powered popper in 1885, movie theaters once banned it, and the whole microwave-popcorn industry traces back to an engineer who noticed a candy bar melting in his pocket next to a radar set. This quiz packs 54 popcorn facts and trivia questions into one place: the physics of the pop (moisture, pressure, temperature), the difference between butterfly and mushroom flakes, why unpopped kernels are called old maids, the stories behind Cracker Jack, Jiffy Pop, kettle corn and Orville Redenbacher, the six Midwestern towns that all call themselves the Popcorn Capital of the World, and the odd corners like popcorn ceilings and popcorn lung. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a few only a food historian would know. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia, the US Census Bureau or the Popcorn Board, and the sentence that proves it is quoted under each question.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Popcorn is a small, hard-shelled variety of which type of corn?
Flint corn
Flint corn has a hard outer shell, and popcorn is its small, extra-tough cousin: that shell is what lets steam build inside until the kernel bursts.
Q 02Popcorn is one of how many major types of corn?
Six
Six major types are recognised: dent, flint, flour, sweet, pod and popcorn. Dent corn fills American silos; sweet corn is what you eat off the cob.
Q 03What do growers do to freshly harvested popcorn kernels so that they pop best?
Dry them out
Dry them out: fresh from the field the kernels are too moist and pop chewy, so growers dry them to about 14 percent moisture, though if they dry further fewer of them pop.
Q 04Against a car tire's 32 psi, roughly what pressure bursts a popcorn kernel?
135 psi
135 psi, roughly four times a car tire, is what the hull holds before it ruptures; the trapped steam then expands so fast that the starch inflates into foam.
Q 05At roughly what temperature does a popcorn kernel pop?
356°F (180°C)
356°F (180°C) is the critical temperature physicists measured in 2015: the water inside boils at 212°F, but the hull holds the steam in until the pressure finally bursts it.
Q 06A single popcorn kernel can swell to as much as how many times its original size?
50 times
50 times is the upper figure popcorn makers quote: steam blows the softened starch up into a foam, and the kernel literally turns inside out.
Q 07The oldest known popcorn, cobs about 6,700 years old, was dug up on the coast of which country?
Peru
Peru's Paredones and Huaca Prieta sites yielded the cobs, even though corn itself was first domesticated far to the north, in southern Mexico.
Q 08In which US state is the 'Bat Cave', where 1948 digs turned up ears of popcorn thousands of years old?
New Mexico
New Mexico's Bat Cave was dug by two Harvard graduate students hunting for traces of early humans; they found hundreds of ancient corn cobs instead.
Q 09Which relative appeared alongside Orville Redenbacher in some of his popcorn commercials?
His grandson
His grandson Gary shared the screen with him; when a digitally recreated Orville starred in a 2007 advert, Gary said, 'Grandpa would go for it.'
Q 10What kind of business did Charles Cretors run before he built his steam-powered popcorn machine?
A candy store
A candy store was Cretors' trade: unhappy with the roaster he bought for the shop, he rebuilt it with a small steam engine, then turned the idea on popcorn.
Q 11At which event did Cretors introduce his popcorn machine to the public in 1893?
The Columbian Exposition in Chicago
The Columbian Exposition in Chicago is where Cretors set up his steam popper on the Midway and gave away free samples until fairgoers lined up to buy.
Q 12How did American street vendors pop corn before steam machines?
Holding a wire basket over an open flame
Holding a wire basket over an open flame left the corn hot but dry and unevenly cooked, the problem Cretors' machine solved by popping it evenly in seasoned oil.
Q 13Cretors' machine popped corn in a mixture of salt, lard and what?
Q 21What new technology of the 1940s caused popcorn consumption to fall?
Television
Television kept people home and out of cinemas in the late 1940s and early 1950s; the Popcorn Institute responded by promoting popcorn as a snack to eat at home in front of the set.
Q 22In which year was the Orville Redenbacher's brand launched?
1970
The brand launched in 1970, when Redenbacher was already in his sixties; he had spent decades breeding hybrids before an ad agency put his name and face on the jar.
Q 23Orville Redenbacher earned his degree in agronomy from which university?
Purdue
Purdue is where Redenbacher studied agronomy, ran track and played tuba in the marching band; sixty years after he graduated, the university gave him an honorary doctorate.
Clarified butter
Clarified butter went into Cretors' popping mix with lard and salt, so the corn came out already seasoned instead of dry.
Q 14Under what name did Chicago's Rueckheim brothers begin selling their molasses-coated popcorn confection in 1896?
Cracker Jack
Cracker Jack took its name from 1890s slang for anything first-rate; in the best-known telling, a taster blurted 'That's a crackerjack!' and the brothers registered the name in 1896.
Q 15The Rueckheim brothers' famous snack recipe mixed popcorn with molasses and which nut?
Peanuts
Peanuts joined popcorn and molasses in the Rueckheims' recipe; the breakthrough, in 1896, was a way to keep the sticky molasses-coated pieces from clumping together.
Q 16Which company bought the Rueckheim brothers' caramel-corn brand from Borden in 1997?
Frito-Lay
Frito-Lay, PepsiCo's snack arm, bought the brand from Borden in 1997 and two years later ran its first commercial in 15 years, aired during the Super Bowl.
Q 17Why did popcorn sales keep rising during the Great Depression?
Bags cost 5 or 10 cents
Bags cost 5 or 10 cents, a luxury even struggling families could afford, and cinemas that started selling it survived while many that refused went under.
Q 18Americans ate three times as much popcorn during World War II largely because what was in short supply?
Sugar
Sugar was the missing ingredient: with supplies sent to the troops and exporters like the Philippines cut off, candy makers were squeezed and snackers switched to popcorn.
Q 19Why did many early movie-theater owners dislike popcorn?
They thought it distracted from the films
They thought it distracted from the films and dirtied their carpets; vendors sold it on the sidewalk outside until theaters realised how much money they were missing.
Q 20Which late-1920s change in the movies brought in far bigger crowds and helped popcorn win a place in theaters?
Talking pictures
Talking pictures swelled movie audiences from the late 1920s, and popcorn vendors followed the crowds, setting up poppers right outside to sell to moviegoers on their way in.
Q 24What name did Orville Redenbacher and partner Charles Bowman give the popcorn hybrid they settled on after years of trials?
RedBow
RedBow was the pick of tens of thousands of hybrid strains the partners tested; when their gourmet corn reached stores in 1970, an ad agency had them sell it under Orville's own name instead.
Q 25High-speed film shows a popping kernel vaulting off the pan like a gymnast, pushing off with what?
A 'leg' of starch
A 'leg' of starch bursts out first and presses on the pan, flinging the kernel upward; the 2015 study that filmed it traced the 'pop' sound to a sudden release of water vapor.
Q 26How did Orville Redenbacher die at his California home in 1995?
He drowned in his hot tub
He drowned in his hot tub after a heart attack at his Coronado condominium, aged 88; twelve years later a digitally recreated Orville returned to pitch popcorn in a new commercial.
Q 27'Popcorn lung' got its name after which group fell ill in the early 2000s?
Microwave popcorn factory workers
Microwave popcorn factory workers breathed in vapor from the butter flavoring day after day and developed scarred, narrowed airways, a disease doctors call bronchiolitis obliterans.
Q 28What is built into a microwave popcorn bag to concentrate heat on the kernels and oil?
Metal film
Metal film, a thin layer called a susceptor, absorbs microwaves and turns them into heat right where the flavored oil sits, so it melts and coats the kernels before they pop.
Q 29Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer discovered microwave cooking when what melted in his pocket?
A candy bar
A candy bar turned to goo in Spencer's pocket beside a live radar tube; curious rather than annoyed, he was soon aiming the same tube at popcorn kernels.
Q 30Which food exploded when Percy Spencer tried it in his first microwave cooking experiments?
A raw egg
A raw egg shook, then burst in the face of whoever was watching, during the same early tests that popped his first popcorn; Raytheon filed its microwave cooking patent on October 8, 1945.