ROCKLAND — First, he made peanut brittle.
Then it was granola. Then chocolate and nuts and chips and giant mixes of any snack he could find.
Justin Cherman says his wife, Amy, thought he was crazy, but that it all clicked when he found the base on which to build a thriving local snack company: popcorn.
“I got hooked on popcorn a little bit and started playing around with it,” he said. “I found it was a good neutral medium to introduce flavors. I was looking at other brands, different oils we could use, different flavors we could introduce.”
For most of 2018, Cherman spent hours in his Weymouth home kitchen popping corn, mixing flavors and taste testing on his wife and brother Mike, whose idea it was to start a snack company in the first place. He heard no, no, no for almost an entire year, but his experimentation ultimately ended in eight unique flavors the trio used to launch Thank You Popcorn, a Rockland-based brand that has exploded onto the local food scene over the last year.