Golden Valley Microwave Foods, a buttery first act and a sequel for the shelf.

Act II is an American brand of microwave popcorn, owned by Conagra Brands. English Wikipedia describes it as based on the look and taste of movie-theatre popcorn and says it is also known simply as Act. Its original maker was Golden Valley Microwave Foods, a company English Wikipedia places in Edina, Minnesota, and whose initials, it says, frequently appeared as GVMF on the packaging.

The company was built around a kitchen appliance. A company history on the Golden Valley Microwave Foods website, archived by the Wayback Machine in January 1998, says GVMF began in 1978 producing microwave entrées, mainly for vending machines, and later added a breakfast food line. Tasting Table, in an article of 29 July 2025, gives the same starting year and says the company set out to capitalise on microwave ovens becoming a staple in the kitchen, launching a line of microwaveable foods.

The popcorn arrived in two instalments. The 1998 company history says microwave popcorn was introduced in 1981 as ACT I, a refrigerated microwave popcorn. Tasting Table explains why it had to be kept cold: the original version contained real butter, a dairy product, so it needed to be refrigerated or frozen before it went into the microwave. Popular as it was, the magazine says, that was not convenient. Three years later came the sequel. Golden Valley’s history says Act II was introduced in 1984 as a shelf-stable microwave popcorn and that it opened many new markets; Tasting Table says the shelf-stable product used an artificial butter flavour in place of real butter.

The package mattered as much as the corn. English Wikipedia credits the Act II popcorn bag to James Watkins, whom it describes as a former engineer for the Pillsbury Company in Minneapolis and then the founder and president of Golden Valley Microwave Foods. The public patent record shows the company’s engineers still refining the format years later. A United States patent for a “microwave corn popping package having flexible and expandable cover” was filed by Golden Valley Microwave Foods on 13 July 1990 and issued on 17 March 1992, and the inventors it names include James D. Watkins.

From an Edina independent to ConAgra, Indiana, Mexico and India.

Golden Valley did not stay independent. Its own 1998 history says that in 1991 Golden Valley Microwave Foods became an independent operating company of ConAgra, and Tasting Table wrote in 2025 that the business was bought by Conagra in 1991 and has remained there since. The company, now called Conagra Brands, has owned Act II since 1991. The purchase put Act II in the same group as Orville Redenbacher’s, the gourmet popcorn that, according to Indiana Humanities and English Wikipedia, ConAgra had acquired in 1990 along with other former Hunt-Wesson businesses.

In the late 1990s, the company presented itself as a complete popcorn operation. The 1998 history says GVMF marketed its products mainly under the Act II name, a range that then included microwave popcorn, popped-corn rice cakes and microwavable breakfast foods and sandwiches, and that it had recently introduced Healthy Choice microwave popcorn. It described two related businesses, Vogel Popcorn, a producer of bulk popcorn, and Phoenix Packaging, which made packaging for microwave popcorn, and said GVMF ran production facilities in Iowa, Ohio and Minnesota, in the heart of popcorn-growing country.

Production later left the company’s home town. The Associated Press reported on 25 January 2007, in a story carried by MPR News, that ConAgra Foods would close its microwave popcorn plant in Edina by late April and transfer production to plants in Rensselaer, Indiana, and Irapuato, Mexico. The AP said the closure was part of a reorganisation that the company had announced in March 2006, and that ConAgra would also expand its Rensselaer plant. The AP described ConAgra as Omaha-based in 2007; Just Food described Conagra Brands as Chicago-headquartered in 2024.

The name also travels abroad. Just Food reported on 29 February 2024 that Conagra Brands was selling its controlling stake in Agro Tech Foods, a food company in India, to the investment firms Convergent Finance and Samara Capital. Conagra, the report said, had enjoyed a partnership with Agro Tech Foods since 1997 and had become its majority shareholder in 2011. After the deal, Just Food said, Agro Tech Foods would continue to license the ACT II brand from Conagra for use in India.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell everyday things from the grocery aisle: microwave popcorn, hot cocoa, apple juice, applesauce, orange juice and iced tea. Their packaging comes in very different forms, from flat paper bags that open out in a microwave and tins or canisters of cocoa powder to juice cartons, plastic bottles and boxes of tea bags, and each format gives a designer a different surface to work with.

A bag, a canister, a carton and a box all have to carry the same few things: a name that can be read from a distance, a picture or colour that signals the flavour, and the instructions and legal text a food label needs. How those elements share the space says a good deal about how a brand wants to be seen on the shelf.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name in capitals, a package built to expand and a range sorted by butter.

Act II’s identity begins with its name. The company’s own 1998 history writes the two products in capitals, as ACT I and ACT II, the second picking up where the refrigerated original left off, and Just Food used the same capitalised form, ACT II, when it reported on the brand’s Indian licence in 2024. English Wikipedia ties the brand to the cinema, describing the popcorn as based on the look and taste of movie-theatre popcorn.

The bag is the product’s other signature. The patent filed by Golden Valley Microwave Foods in 1990 describes a microwave corn-popping package with a flexible, expandable cover, and English Wikipedia credits the Act II bag to James Watkins. Once the popcorn no longer needed a refrigerator, the 1998 company history says, it opened many new markets, and the same page told shoppers to look for GVMF products at mass merchandisers, grocery, club and convenience stores, as well as in vending machines.

The range is organised around butter. Tasting Table, which tried the brand for an article in July 2025, lists varieties that step up from Light Butter and Butter to Movie Theater Butter and Xtreme Butter, alongside flavours such as Hot & Spicy and a kettle corn. It described the Xtreme Butter bag as retro-designed and the popcorn inside as a vivid, intensely buttery yellow, and it noted that the brand released a macaroni-and-cheese flavour in 2021.

For a design guide, Act II shows how a product name can carry a story — a refrigerated opening act followed by a shelf-stable sequel — and how the package itself, a bag built to expand in the oven, becomes part of the brand. Compare it with Orville Redenbacher’s, its popcorn stablemate at Conagra, and Banquet, another Conagra brand built for the home freezer and oven. For this guide we use theatre red, butter yellow, popcorn white and curtain maroon with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Act II’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.