Pompano mom brings sweet twist to old favorite with South Florida’s first ‘popcorn bar’
Sometimes you look down and realize that your life’s dream was in your hands all along.
Maria Bailey munches on a handful of popcorn as she oversees assembly of sweet treats in the back shop at Popilicious, a “popcorn bar” she recently opened with her daughter Madison Bailey Mengueme and son-in-law Hugues Mengueme in Pompano Beach’s rapidly growing East Atlantic Boulevard redevelopment zone.
“I have always loved popcorn,” Maria says between bites.
Standing at long stainless steel tables, Madison and Hugues make popcorn wedding cakes, popcorn graduation cakes, mini popcorn cakes, popcorn pizza, popcorn bars, popcorn sundaes, and anything else their loyal customers ask them to conjure.
It’s a long way from your grandparents’ holiday tins and those three sections of soon-to-be-stale salted, caramel and cheese corns.
“Think Cold Stone Creamery, but with popcorn,” Maria says. Or maybe it’s Harry & David’s run amok. The store’s front counter resembles an old-fashioned ice cream parlor.
Fresh popcorn is merely the base onto which a seemingly endless variety of flavors can be alloyed: peanut butter cups, pretzels, graham crackers, coconut, Oreo cookies, gummi bears and much more. All told, customers have their choice of 20 ingredients to mix into their popcorn before dousing it with white, milk or dark chocolate sauce and stirring it into a sticky, decadent mess, served in a cardboard tub with tongs to keep your fingers clean.
The confections that are manufactured in the back are displayed along the counter and in the front window, each wrapped in cellophane and cinched to gift-readiness with a colored ribbon.
“We don’t put anything in tins,” Maria says. “We think popcorn should be pretty.”
She says Popilicious is South Florida’s first popcorn bar and only the second in Florida, behind a similar-but-not-quite-the-same kind of kiosk at Walt Disney World. “I like to think I came up with the idea first,” she says.
The treat factory is the culmination of a love affair that goes back to Maria’s childhood. In middle school, she ran the popcorn machine at the concession stand. At Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, fellow graduate students noticed that her desk was always ringed with stray popcorn pieces that failed to land in her mouth during class. “My friends said, ‘You’ve got to do something with popcorn.'”
The idea stuck in her head like a lodged kernel as she set upon her career. She learned how to treat customers during 11 years as community relations director for the Miami Herald, then at AutoNation as vice president of loyalty marketing. She opened a marketing business, MSM Media Inc. that specializes in connecting brands with moms like herself.
In 2019, when daughter Madison was serving in the Peace Corps in Cameroon and her Army captain son Owen was stationed in Afghanistan, Maria kept herself occupied by tinkering in the kitchen with popcorn and marshmallows. Soon, inspired by the classic Rice Krispies Treats, her first popcorn cake was born.
She offered it for sale on Facebook. “I had 400 orders during the first two weeks,” she says.
She created an ecommerce website and learned as much about popcorn as she could. (Fun fact: Freezing preserves popcorn by removing the oxygen that makes it go stale but doesn’t make the popcorn brittle. Popilicious snacks can be kept frozen for a long time.)
Parlaying her marketing connections, Maria soon found herself pitching her popcorn treats on Good Morning America. About 3,000 orders flooded in.
“Madison was coming home from Cameroon and I asked her if she could help make popcorn cakes,” she said.
Madison, with a master’s degree in global health, had been helping the people of Cameroon stay healthy. When Maria asked her to become a partner in the business, Madison saw it as an extension of her work — treats help nourish the soul, after all — and dedicates a portion of the store’s profits to A2Empowerment, a scholarship program for Cameroonian women and children.
More success followed, as did promotional appearances on the QVC shopping channel, and Fox and Friends.
Mom and daughter even recruited Madison’s husband, Hugues Mengueme, a former professional soccer player in Cameroon who Madison met on a long train ride to meet Maria when she landed in the capital, Yaoundé, for a visit.
A knee injury ended Mengueme’s soccer career and now he coaches the sport part-time in South Florida.
On most days, he can be found in the back room of Popilicious with Madison assembling the day’s fresh treats.
For years, the family concentrated on direct mail, special events, and wholesaling to other retailers before deciding to open their own store.
Related Articles
Business | Like Black Friday every week: Hotbins liquidation chain hooks shoppers with returns from Amazon and big-box stores
The idea to have a popcorn bar along with premade treats was inspired by trips Maria made to movie theaters, where see would see patrons buy candy and popcorn, then dump the candy into the popcorn tub. “I said, ‘why should people have to go to movies to get popcorn the way they want it?'”
Maria’s family have operated businesses in the area since the 1940s, when father-in-law Patrick Bailey opened his law firm on East Atlantic Boulevard. Her husband Tim later joined the practice, and Maria located her marketing firm a couple miles west on Northeast 1st Street.
She says she’s proud to be part of the area’s rebirth as a commercial, residential and tourist corridor. Diners at the newly opened food hall across the street, The Bite Eatery, walk across the street for desert, she says. Tourists from the beach side walk across the intracoastal waterway bridge to visit the shop.
She says she thought about locating in one of the new retail spots in and around the new parking garage and beachfront restaurants just south of East Atlantic but decided to stay within an easy commute for both locals and tourists.
Since the store opened in late January, it’s been turning a profit, Maria says.
Madison, who takes care of the day-to-day operations while Maria continues to run her marketing business, says she’d love to see it evolve into a national franchise some day, with Popilicious stores everywhere.
Meanwhile, the Pompano Beach location would remain the mothership. “My goal is to make it the destination stop for people coming to South Florida — like Jaxson’s Ice Cream Parlor in Dania Beach,” Madison says.
That would would prompt patrons to pop a lot of Ps as they tell their friends about Pompano Beach’s famous Popilicious popcorn bar.
Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071, on Twitter @ronhurtibise or by email at rhurtibise@sunsentinel.com.
