Hansen Foods to sell Pentwater Service Club caramel corn.

​​Hansen Foods to sell Pentwater Service Club caramel corn.

HART — The Pentwater Service Club announced that locally-owned Hansen Foods will carry the club’s flagship Pentwater Service Club Caramel Corn, making it the first store in the area to carry the product.

In previous years the club’s caramel corn has been available only during special, summertime events. “We knew we wanted to be part of this expansion when we learned that the club donates 100 percent of its profits back into a community my store serves,” said Dave Hansen, second generation owner of the popular, gourmet grocery store.

The 51-year-old Pentwater Service Club decided to expand when COVID cancellations took away many of the summer venues the club traditionally used to fund programs for the people of Greater Pentwater.

“Kudos to Dave Hansen and all the wonderful Hansen associates for being such an important partner with our 80 club members,” said Mark Trierweiler, club president. “When you purchase a bag of our gourmet caramel corn at Hansen Foods it means that we will be able to do just that much more to help those in need during this terrible pandemic, and beyond.”

The addition of Hansen Foods brings the number of retailers carrying the club’s caramel corn to six, which has seen record-growth since 2020 when the club began its retail expansion as a way of paying for programs that meet the unmet needs of people living in the Greater Pentwater Area.

“‘Making a great place even better’ has been the club’s motto since its founding in 1970,“ said Mat Hacker, distribution manager for the club’s caramel corn. Hacker, a long-time club member and former store owner, said the club’s caramel is handmade by volunteers in a multi-step, highly monitored, sterile environment where everything has to be done at the perfect temperature and time. “We measure our movements in split-seconds around here because most of us have been doing this for decades and because we all understand that premium ingredients aren’t enough; it’s the precision and care with which those ingredients are processed and handled that makes our caramel corn so mouth-watering delicious.” Hacker, who is known around Pentwater for his gregarious laugh and tender heart, said there’s nothing like it on the market. “You can see the difference right on the shelf,” Hacker said, “Huge kernels of corn, cooked to perfection and uniformly coated with our own recipe that’s sweet but not so sweet that it makes you feel guilty the next day when you step on the scales.”

Overseeing the production are master caramel corn makers George Mikulyuk and Gene Jankowski, who have 25 combined years of experience making caramel corn. Referring to their common-bond friendship based on caramel corn-making, Jankowski said, “We’ve been doing this together for decades and all I can say is, ‘it never gets old feeling good about what we do for Pentwater through the Service Club.’”

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