If you shop in Manchester, you’ll no doubt have walked past one of them hundreds of times.
Bright green and yellow with cartoonish artwork on the side, Magic Corn's sweetcorn stalls seem to be marketed at children but surely most hungry kids would prefer a Maccies or something equally unhealthy.
I can’t say that I’ve personally ever had a particular hankering for a cup of sweetcorn while out and about in town, but the stalls have been there for years - Magic Corn was founded in Malaysia in 1988 and arrived in the UK in 2006.
On a cold, wet, windy February afternoon, I made the short journey from Farnworth to Manchester to see if I had been missing out all this time.
As I walked down Market Street, there were a couple of familiar sights; buskers - check, plenty of shoppers - check. However, a stall inexplicably selling sweetcorn in a polystyrene cup was sadly nowhere to be seen.
But as I headed back towards the car park, there he was.
Battling the elements with an umbrella protecting his wheeled stall, the sweetcorn man was getting himself into position.
After he parked up, I had a look through the different variations on offer - chicken, Mexican chilli, American spice, and jalapeno to name but a few.
Bamboozled by the abundance of choice, I asked the stall owner for his recommendation.
“A lot of people really like the Asian spice,” he told me.
A customer who had arrived behind me agreed.
“It’s f***ing unreal,” she said.
Her friend added: “Honestly she tried it two weeks ago and she hasn’t shut up about it since.”
The woman who gave Asian spice such a glowing recommendation told me that she’d been doing some of her own research into what the spice actually is.
After discovering it was chaat masala, she tried to find it in every supermarket, before eventually sourcing some from an Indian restaurant.
Such dedication made me think it must be worth having and I ordered that, along with barbecue and traditional buttered and salted - taking advantage of the generous offer of three small cups for £4.
As the stall owner lifted the metal lid on his corn, the unmistakable aroma wafted towards me.
He poured the corn into a plastic jug, seasoned it, gave it an almighty shake and then emptied it out in small cups.
The pleasant scent of the cooked sweetcorn probably tricked my brain into thinking I was much hungrier than I actually was but after paying on card, I found a bench and wolfed down my first cup all the same.
Starting with the Asian spice, I was not disappointed.
I’m a sucker for a curry and the heat of the chaat masala really complemented the sweetness of the corn.
I didn’t time how long it took me to finish my cup but it couldn’t have been much longer than a minute.
As I tried to swap to my second cup (barbecue) I lost a few kernels, so I wouldn’t recommend ordering three cups at once if you’re on your own.
From my days working at Nando’s I know that saucy sweetcorn can be a thing of beauty and the smokiness of the barbecue sauce worked well with the flavour of the corn.
I kept looking over at the stall while eating my sweetcorn and surely enough, there were a steady stream of customers, and I had started to understand why.
My final cup was butter and salt and you already know what that tastes like - but I was impressed by the quality of the corn and the fact it was still delicious without any gimmicks.
It’s fair to say that I had been incredibly sceptical about the stalls, but in the course of less than 10 minutes - and after three small cups of sweetcorn - I had been corn-verted.
Cheap, warming and genuinely really tasty - you could really do much much worse if you need a quick snack on the go while out shopping.
