Anyone purchasing an expensive piece of machinery has to be considering their Return On Investment (ROI), either actively with pencil and paper (so to speak) or at least passively pondering it in the back of their mind.

This isn't so much of a concern for those just starting a popcorn business, whether a store front, vending operation or wholesale production, as the benefits of a Robo Popcorn machine are pretty clear. But, for those already using older and traditional oil popper, the question is always on their mind.

Sure, they are the wave of the future, and obviously a better choice when starting from scratch.... but how much money will you actually save when replacing existing equipment, and how long will it take to earn back the investment in productively and savings?

Of course there isn't one simple answer as a lot depends on the size and scope of your operation. A wholesale producer running a RoboPop machine will earn back their investment much faster than a start-up who might only pop corn just a few hours a week.

So, while we can't provide a single answer that applies to everyone, we can explain the variables that will allow you to make a pretty good estimate, based on your own operation.

Production

A traditional oil popping kettle is rated in the amount of seed per batch. For example a 60 oz popper that runs a batch every 3 minutes sounds like it will produce 20 batches an hour, for a total rate of 75 lbs per hour.

However, someone has to be there to dump the kettle and load seed every batch, so as a practical matter, you're more likely to produce something much closer to 17 batches per hour, for a total closer to 60 lbs per hour.

By contrast, the RoboPop 75 will actually pop 75 lbs of seed per hour with little human involvement. Once very 15 minutes or so you'll want to roll away your popped corn and top off the seed hopper, but that doesn't interrupt or slow down production!

This means that a replacing a traditional oil popper with a RoboPop results in 25% greater production.

Man Hours

At first glance, you realize this means you can pop the same amount of corn with 25% less payroll hours, so you can do the math on this savings based on your employee costs.

Beyond this simple calculation, there's a great amount of productivity gained while popping as well. Remember, rather than having to babysit the oil popper due to its 3 minute cycle, when you're operating a RoboPop you only have to change out the production cart, dump the orphans tray and top off seed a few times an hour. This means you can multi-task during the vast majority of time the popper is running.
Whether that means running another popper (or two, or three) or operating a caramelizer, bagging product, managing inventory or even doing book keeping and inventory tasks, at least 50 minutes of each our are available to do something (anything) else you need!

The bottom line on this calculation means that not only does the RoboPop produce 25% more popcorn per hour, but the human labor input is actually only 10 minutes or so at the same time.

Again, what that's worth to you depends on your labor costs. Between the increased production and drastically reduced employee time, you are effectively running the RoboPop without any actual labor cost because the time saved by increased production saves 15 minutes per hour, which is greater than the 10 minutes of labor your expend.

Obviously if you're a small operation or not particularly busy, and your employees have nothing else to do with their time, then they can just stand there while the popper runs and you won't save much in labor beyond the 25% less time it takes to pop your daily or weekly quota.

For business that are busy, understaffed and who could put the 50 minutes saved out of each hour to good use, the savings are going to offset the entire cost of the RoboPop machine within 5-6 months. And, to be clear, that's not just the difference in cost between an oil popper and a RoboPop, that's the entire cost of the machine. You can literally throw away your oil popper and earn back a RoboPop machine in that time frame.

The Expense of Oil

Most people don't think about the cost of popping oil, but those running a popcorn business know how expensive this input is all to well.

When you're popping dry corn for post popping production (adding savory mixes, coating in cheese or caramelizing) then using a RoboPop saves you 100% of the oil you're using to simply pop corn. For some smaller operations, this savings might only amount to $100 a week, for others, including many of our clients, it's Hundreds or even Thousands of dollars week!

For your regular "ready-to-eat" popcorn, with salt and butter oil added during popping, then the RoboPop 60 can produce this for you, while still saving 30%-40% on your oil costs. This is because lightly drizzling oil onto the air popped corn requires much (much) less oil that actually frying seed in oil with traditional poppers.

The amount of money you'll recapture here is pretty easy to calculate as long as you determine how much oil you're using to pop corn that is served ready to eat and how much is used when the corn is moving on to adding seasonings, cheese and caramelizing.

For the "ready-to-eat" production you can generally expect to reduce your oil expense by 35% - though this depends on whether you serve lightly seasoned and healthier corn or preference toward the heavily oiled/seasoned end of the spectrum. As such, you can use anywhere between 30% to 40% depending on your product preferences.

In the seasoned/cheese/caramel category, your oil saves are basically 100%. Of course you'll still use oil to add the seasonings, make the cheese coating (unless you're buying pre-made pastes) and in the caramelizing process (depending on your recipes, of course) but you'll use no oil to pop the corn, so it's that portion you now save in its entirety.

Again, some may save only $100 a week while others $1,000 just depending on the scale of your operation, the recipes you use and the cost of your oil, which can vary greatly from cheaper vegetable oils on the lower end up to filtered coconut oils on the higher quality range of gourmet popcorn.

Output

An entirely real, but harder to calculate cost savings comes from the greater productivity in the actual popcorn produced. Customers report that in addition to popping seed at a much faster rate than with oil based systems, the actual volume of their output generally increases by around 30% as well.

This is due to two simple factors. First, air popped corn tends to expand more than oil fried seed, and also because oil saturation tends to shrink the popped kernels a bit as well. Second, customers are usually quite surprised at how much less seed is lost to un-popped and under-popped kernels. While we can't claim this is universal to all air-poppers, our patented Vortex popping chambers definitely pop larger pieces with much less waste.

Cleanup

Lastly, another savings is labor cost is the cleanup of equipment. Because there's no oil frying involved, cleaning up most RoboPop machines each day amounts to nothing more than a quick brush or vacuum taken to the popping chamber and sifter and occasionally a damp rag. There's no burnt oil or carbon build up anywhere, so this clean up is a trivial task. If you're using the RP60 which applies oil and salt for "ready-to-eat" popcorn then you'll have some excess oil and salt to wipe off, but since it has not been subjected to high temperatures, it's still just a pretty quick wipe-down. Depending on how well you're used to maintaining your existing oil poppers, the saving here might be just a few minutes a day, but there's still a calculation to be made.

In the end, the ROI on a RoboPop popcorn popper is going to vary depending on your operation, labor costs, recipes and oil type and consumption. These can easily be estimated by most owners in just a few minutes. What we can say with confidence is that when labor, productivity, production output and oil costs are combined, just about any organization is going to be able to fully recapture their investment in under six months, and often much less.

More than anything, this explains why so many of our clients start with just one machine, but then come back for more as they see their actual savings materialize in their bottom line.

It also explains why you'll seldom see a "used" RoboPop machine on the market for sale. Unless the owner is closing up shop, they don't ever sell them!

Once you go RoboPop, you never go back!

PS: For those that simply prefer producing old fashioned oil fried / kettle corn varieties, we still make those too.
Just ask if that's what you really want.