Orville Sharp White Cheddar Popcorn is marketed as a 100% whole grain, healthy snack. Just how healthy is this ready-to-eat popcorn, and how does it compare with Smartfood?


For a product promoting the Sharp White Cheddar aspect with glowing photos, there just isn't much of a cheddar flavor here. With the Smartfood popcorn, it tastes like real cheddar was layered over the popcorn, with that delicious, full flavor. Here it's as if some cheese-like flavoring was barely sprinkled on it. It barely tastes cheddary.

It's not that it's bad, but more that it's "mostly harmless". When there is another option to choose from, it doesn't make sense to take this one instead, if cheddariness is your goal.

So then, maybe this one is more nutritious?

Unfortunately, no.

With this Orville bag you get 1.5oz of popcorn. The Smartfood comes in a 1oz container. So the Smartfood is a better portion for portion control, and is still quite filling. That then also causes a significant skew in what you're ingesting. Here are the stats. In each pair the first number is the Orville number, and the second is the Smartfood number.

Calories: 240 / 160
Fat Calories: 140 / 90
Total Fat: 16g / 10g
Saturated Fat: 2g / 2g
Trans Fat: 0g / 0g
Cholesterol: <5g / <5g
Sodium: 420mg / 290mg
Total Carbs: 21g / 14g
Fiber: 2g / 2g
Protein: 3g / 3g

So you get just as much protein and fiber when eating the SmartFood popcorn. And you save yourself quite a lot on carbs, sodium, fat, and calories. In just about every way the SmartFood is the better choice.

If the Orville Redenbacher was enormously tastier, then I might say it's worth the occasional splurge to have it instead. Just as I occasionally might eat a hot fudge sundae. But if the flavor isn't as good, *and* the health markers aren't as good, I'm not sure what my incentive would be to eat the Orville Redenbacher brand.

All in all, I always recommend eating fresh foods vs packaged ones. So if you're going to "splurge" and have a treat for something like this, I'd say to make it worth it and go for the best tasting one you can get. In my opinion, that's the SmartFood choice.

I was provided a sample of the Orville Redenbacher's Sharp White Cheddar popcorn from the Amazon Vine program, for the purpose of doing this review. That being said, we buy hundreds of food products for testing every year with our own money, and this comparison is one of many we've made in this product area.


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