What weighs 6,000 pounds, is held together by a secret recipe of sticky goop, has traveled 15,000 miles and gets more rotund with each pit stop?
Oh, yeah, it’s edible, too. (Well, at least for a brave few.)
It’s the World’s Largest Popcorn Ball–and there has never been anything quite like it. In fact, the roly-poly treat is more than twice the heft of the puny one in the 1997 Guinness Book of World Records.
The corpulent ball will roll into Chicago Friday when it makes its 28th stop on a 51-city, nine-week tour as part of a Boy Scouts of America fundraiser. Workers will roll the ball out of its 18-wheeler home onto North Michigan Avenue near the Tribune Tower at about 8 a.m., where it will rest until 1 p.m.
The sweet mass of puffed corn is more than a mere tribute to the magic of caramel coating, though. It’s a hands-ons exhibit that literally feeds off the public’s willingness to dirty its hands to be part of a Guinness Book record.
Anyone who drops by can grab a handful of caramel-coated popcorn and slap it onto the ever-growing popcorn ball.
Weaver Popcorn, which supplied the popcorn and is staging the event, seized on the World’s Largest Popcorn Ball idea after a Boy Scout Troop in La Crosse, Wis., created a 2,377-pound ball in 1995. Weaver, along with the Boy Scouts of America, decided a traveling ball would help generate interest in the Scouts’ annual popcorn selling fundraiser.
But Jeff Kuehl, spokesman for the Chicagoland area of the Boy Scouts of America, said there is a serious side to the event. “The money will help pay for summer camp fees, youth leadership training programs and other important Scouting programs,” he said.
The Boys Scouts hope to generate $2.5 million.
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Carting a 6,000-pound, 10-foot-high mass of food across the country is no simple task. The creation travels in a 53-foot tractor-trailer complete with a kitchen and several volunteers who watch over the ball as if it were the Hope Diamond.
When they reach their destination, three volunteers roll the ball in its metal cradle along portable railroad tracks. Meanwhile, another volunteer pours a mixture of sugar and corn syrup over dozens of popcorn filled trays to hand out to the public.