Sac City, Iowa keeps a popcorn ball weighing 9,370 pounds in a climate controlled shed of its own on West Main Street, with windows on every side so it can be seen at any hour. It is the fourth record ball the town has made. The first, in April 1995, weighed 2,225 pounds and was organized by Shirley Phillips of the county economic development and tourism office with Milo Lines of the Noble Popcorn Company; it toured the parade circuit for two years and was then blown up with seven sticks of dynamite at the Sac County Fair. A 3,100 pound ball followed in June 2004, after a Boy Scout troop in Wisconsin took the record, and a 5,000 pound one in February 2009, built by more than 250 volunteers over twelve hours and displayed in a red shed until 2016, when it was cut apart with the Jaws of Life. The current ball was made on 18 June 2016 at the Noble Popcorn plant by hundreds of volunteers packing popcorn and syrup into a plastic form built by Lundell Plastics of Odebolt, and forklifted to the museum village on 1 July. It stands over eight feet tall, in a mould twelve feet across. Each of the earlier balls was beaten in turn, by those Boy Scouts, by a team from a popcorn company at Lake Forest, Illinois, and by the Indiana State Fair, which is why the town kept building. Guinness now requires a record popcorn ball to be eaten, so this one is uncertified and simply the biggest anyone knows of. Noble Popcorn was sold in 2022 and trades as Cedar Creek Popcorn, and Main Street here is the old alignment of US Highway 20, bypassed by the four lane expressway in 2012.
Getting there
42.4226, -95.0000
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