Home football games in Tuscaloosa involve logistics. Fans have to park and find their seats. The football players use buses to get to Bryant-Denny Stadium. Then, there’s the food. Cheering burns calories and that means more trips to the concession stand for some stadium dogs or nachos. One place in Tuscaloosa is responsible for a crunchy item on the game day menu.
Think back to the last time you bought popcorn. It probably came in a bag or in a souvenir tub, right? Chances are it probably didn’t come by the truck load. We’re outside The Nut Shop in Tuscaloosa. As the name implies, they sell nuts, chocolate, and popcorn. And, we mean a lot of popcorn. A delivery truck is making a drop off of unpopped kernels. Today’s load is fifty bags at fifty pounds each. All of it winds up here.
“We're starting today, Tuesday, to get ready for next Wednesday pickup,” said Cecilia Rice, owner of the Nut Shop.
We’re in the popping room with Rice. Her job is to supply all the popcorn for home games of the Alabama Crimson Tide.
"And they have to pick up on Wednesday before the game on Saturday to be able to get it. The dog sniffed and everything else. So, it takes us about a week. And so, we have three games back-to-back, and we will not stop popping until probably the Tuesday before the last game,” she said.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. We visited the Nut Shop just before Alabama played the LSU Tigers. This week is homecoming and a game against Oklahoma. And Rice will be filling that order as well. How much popcorn are we talking about?
"Great question this week, 285 bags, that's 1425 pounds of popcorn,” Rice said.
Over seven home games, that comes to about nine thousand pounds, or roughly five tons. Rice says the Nut Shop is a family business, and the whole family pitches in.
“My sister is a school nurse. My niece is a school teacher, and my sister's daughter-in-law works here with us. So, it is a family run business, and if we get like we had the 346 for Wisconsin, my sister and my niece were coming in when they got out of school at 3:00 and 3:30 to come in and work and help us out also,” said Rice.
The Nut Shop isn’t the only business associated with the snack market at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Another one goes back to 1960. Legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant arrived in Tuscaloosa in 1958. His namesake TV show, sponsored by both Coca-Cola and Golden Flake potato chips, started just two years later.
“It was an ideal job on the Bear Bryant show. I worked as an assistant for six years and then produced it the last four years.” said Julie McLaughlin.
Julie Mooney McLaughlin had a front row seat while she worked in marketing for Golden Flake.
"It was the best job in the company. Marketing is taste testing new products and packaging and radio commercials and television and sports sponsorships,” she said.
And Mooney says that meant a lot of time spent with coach Bryant as he talked about the Tide’s latest game while snacking on a bag of Golden Flake chips.
"Coach Bryant was the most charismatic man you ever would want to meet. He pulled you in. He was nice and friendly, and you felt like you were part of the team that we would have suited up and gone out on the field if he had asked us to,” Julie said.
And still sixty-five years later, Golden Flake remains the official chip of the Crimson Tide. So, the Bear Bryant connection worked for Golden Flake back in the day, but how did The Nut Shop swing a similar deal to start supplying popcorn for Bryant Denny Stadium? Cecilia Rice says it all began as a handshake with Levy, the company that handles concessions.
“And so, Levy made an appointment, came in and sat down with us and said, we'll order about 100 bags a game. No, they do a lot, about 200 to 285 bags a game, just for the concession stands. So, it was just a verbal commitment from them, and we moved forward with that,” she said.
Rice says there’s only one downside to popping that much popcorn and shipping it to football fans with the munchies on game day.
“It smells bad. It gets in your hair, and if you don't wash your hair every day, just that odor stays in your hair for the whole week,” she said.
And Cecilia will just take everyone’s word for it if her latest round of popcorn was well received.
“We don't go to games. We do not go to the football game, so I don't know.” said Rice.
So, the news may come in the form of another big order of popcorn for the next home game.
