people's pops: A Love Story

We sort of consider ourselves matchmakers here at people’s pops – when it comes to pops, we couple fruits with herbs and spices and marry them into delicious and dynamic flavors on the reg.  But when it comes to peoples, well…we tend to stick to the pops side of things. 

So when Sara Heaton emailed us about her upcoming wedding, we – the masters of all things icy – found our hearts melting as we read her story, and since she took the time to share her story with us, we’re taking the time to share her story with you. 

I am writing to share a story about how significant your popsicles have been in some recent events in my life.

Three summers ago I went on a first date with a guy named Justin. He suggested meeting at Chelsea Market, getting some artisanal popsicles (yours, of course) and enjoying them while walking on the Highline. Three years later, this guy is now my fiancé and, with the guidance of your amazing recipe book, we are making and consuming popsicles like crazy, trying to decide which one to make for our wedding guests on September 1st in New Hampshire.  That first date had been such a hit that we kept talking about re-doing it someday. We eventually did on May 5th of this year, and that's when Justin “popped” the question! It's hard to say whether or not the popsicles we had on that first date were directly responsible for the success of the date, but they certainly contributed and have stuck in my mind with significant importance. This summer, as we make practically every recipe in your book, we have been telling all our friends about your creative pops and will certainly also do so at the wedding when we serve them.

I just wanted to share this and say thanks for having all these cool ideas about popsicles and sharing them with us!

It’s pretty rad to know that our pops were there when two people came together for the first time, and were there again when they came together for the first time as husband and wife.  Pretty rad, indeed.

Thank you Sara and Justin for sharing your story with us!  We wish you all the best and hope this new chapter of your life is oh so sweet.

Who knows where the next love connection will happen...

pumpkin pie pops & The High Line

It's that time of year again:  pumpkin pie pops!  You have until October 28th to make your way over to our High Line shop and taste for yourself.

In the mean time, check out the behind-the-scenes of these delicious pops courtesy of The High Line Blog here, or check out the e-mail we woke up to this morning.  Thanks Lorie, this is seriously what keeps us going:

From: Lorie

Date: October 20, 2013

To: people@peoplespops.com

Subject: Pumpkin Pie People's Pops

Earlier in the week there was a High Line post in my FB feed about the

Pumpkin Pie Pop. My mom and I walk on the High Line almost every week

and I told her about it. We decided we were definitely going to try a

Pumpkin Pie Pop this weekend. It sounded a bit strange but I've had

other combos that I wasn't sure of and they always taste great (I

usually ask for a recommendation when I buy one).

Anyway, they are fantastic! The fresh ginger and swirls of cream are

amazing! It's like eating a frozen pumpkin pie with whipped cream on

top. Seriously delicious. I told the woman at the stand but wanted you

all to know-delicious!

Thanks!

Lorie

Freezer Diorama Fantasies Do Come True

Two years after Nat wrote about her freezer diorama fantasy, Leila took it upon herself to transform the people's pops Chelsea Market freezer into a bucolic beach scene entirely made out of ice pop ingredients.  Note the pop-stick lifeguard chair.  The beach towels made out of napkins.  The beach umbrella made out of business cards.  The beach chair made out of shave ice spoons.

Truly the mark of artistic genius!

Thanks Leila, and everyone else who made this year so incredible.  Dear customers, you still have until Oct 31 to find our pops at Chelsea Market; after that, visit our wholesale customers for your fix.

See you next year!!

Nat, Dave & Joel

Another Year Goes By

How does this happen?  Another entire season whizzed by in the blink of an eye.  It was a busy one...  

We built a kitchen in the Pfizer building, turning a space that looked like this: 

into one that looked like this:

We never thought we'd exceed our life goal of appearing in a favorable spot on New York Magazine's approval matrix.....but then we landed the cover (tiny pic but it counts!!)

We also published a cookbook!  (Find it here)

We built a new shop in Park Slope: 

 

It has a Ms. Pac-Man machine!

And we survived a bunch of Department of Health inspections--A's everywhere!

Lots of people chipped in to help.  Danielle and Katie made us artwork (and lent us lots of moral support):  

Nat's dad custom-built a stick-stamping device: 

Our buddy John ginned up a crazy useful online inventory tracker:

And Joel's dad made us giganto-pops that came in handy surprisingly often: 

We made tons of pops in new and awesome flavors: peach-habanero, watermelon-ginger, cantaloupe-jasmine, apple-lavender, Toby's Estate coffee pops, raspberry rosewater, rhubarb-chai...

We even started selling wine pops!  (e.g. strawberry lemongrass with Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc)

We launched three flavors of delicious wholesale pops: 

strawberry-rhubarb

raspberry-basil

Concord grape

They're available at these fine stores...

Here's what the packaging looks like:

We got covered by CNN, Shape magazine, USA Today, Parade, the New York Times Book Review, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, the New York Daily News, Vogue magazine, Entrepreneur.com, and many other fine publications 

(Here's us on Japanese TV)

Sharlena and Charlie came back for a third year, Darren and Brian for a second, and a bunch of other AWESOME PEOPLE joined our team.

Here's the 2012 Hall of Fame:

Ashley
Bill
Brian
Bryan
Catarina
Chan
Charlie
Chris
Darren
David
Dominique
Ieva
Jeremy
Joel
Kevin
Leila
Marilyn
Michael C
Michael S
Mike O
Nathalie
Scott
Sharlena
Vanessa

Plus, we had lots of fun in the kitchen.  

 We feel really blessed to be wrapping up another fantastic season....but thanks our wholesale customers, you can now get people's pops year-round!

Here's to that!!

21st Century Capitalists, and Proud

It’s a very short step from pickles to ice pops, at least in Brooklyn, so we read with great interest Adam Davidson’s recent economics column in the NYT, “Don't Mock the Artisanal Pickle-Makers,” about the post-industrial, post-recession move in certain sectors towards a craft-centered economy.

Yes, as the author says, “it’s tempting to look at craft business as simply a rejection of modern industrial capitalism.” Dave, Joel and I went into business together because we wanted an alternative to corporate jobs, the liberty of being our own bosses, of shaping our own lives, and of making decisions led as much by principles as they are by economics. But when Davidson says, “It would break their heart to be called model 21^st-century capitalists,” he’s wrong. To us, there is no higher compliment. To be able to lift our business out of the artisanal ghetto into the realm of consequence, resonance and profitability is a dream that, with much hard work, is slowly coming true.

Don’t get me wrong—I venerate artisans, embrace locavorism, and spend as much on the handmade and humble, whether it’s jewelry or goat’s milk cajeta, as any Brooklyn hipster. But I challenge the dichotomy created by a small-is-beautiful, big-is-bad worldview. Companies such as Chipotle, Organic Valley and Whole Foods are showing us that you can mass-produce responsibly, that you can empower all levels of people within a large corporation, and that there’s a huge and growing audience for consciously sourced goods.

In fact, it’s snotty, fallacious and unworkably purist to believe otherwise. If we at People’s Pops can continue to source our fruit from nearby farms, supporting our local ecology and economy, but we are making 100 times more pops than we are making now and they are still as delicious, is that still a good thing?

We think it is.

If we can provide 50 more jobs than we did when we started, but our cherries get pitted by machines rather than by humans, is that still a good thing?

We think it is. (You probably would too, if you’d ever spent entire days pitting cherries by hand while your brain slowly rotted.)

And why do we have to trade profit for satisfaction? If our product is terrific and enough people buy it, we and our employees can be happy and prosperous. Isn’t that good too?

Bring it on, Davidson. Say it loud! We are 21st century capitalists, and proud!!

pitting cherries artisanally

People's Pops Vision Quest

As small-business owners, we spend a lot of time scrutinizing and discussing other businesses. What makes walking into Buvette, Do or Dine, or Porsena so heart-warming? What specific elements render the Hotel Saint Cecilia so magical? What puts Costco at the top, and Wal-Mart at the bottom, of employee-happiness rankings, even though they’re in the same business?

One of the organizations I’ve most admired over the course of my biz-ucation is Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which opened thirty or so years ago as a Jewish deli and has now grown into a “community” of 13 businesses (coffee roaster, cheesemaking dairy & publishing house, to name a few), still based in Ann Arbor. These peeps take corporate culture creation to another level, so I read founder Ari Weinzweig’s “A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Building a Great Business” with deep and abiding interest, marking up my copy until it was more ink than paper. Then I sent copies to Dave & Joel.

Last month, having spent enough daiquiri-sipping beach time to have gathered a modicum of perspective on our 2011 season, we got together for a “visioning” exercise that the book describes. Before meeting, we each spent an hour individually painting the most positive shape we could imagine our business morphing into in five or ten years, if everything we did from now til then went absolutely perfectly. Then we shared our visions.

A small business can either run you, or you can run it. There are so many daily fires to fight that years can elapse before you lift your head and take stock of where you’ve ended up. The point of the visioning exercise is to set down goals and chart a course to them, allowing you to move ahead proactively rather than reactively.

To no one’s surprise, our visions matched very closely. Even the three of us had never formally “visioned” together before, we’ve spent enough time discussing and debating our philosophies and dreams for them to have meshed into ones we hold collectively, and our business is very much a child of that. Despite that, it feels really good to set our sights on a landmark ahead, instead of adrift in an infinite sea.

It’s hard work, analyzing who you want to be (and, just as importantly, who you don’t). But that’s what gives organizations like the Saint Cecilia and Zingerman’s their identity, and determines why the people who work there care and love it.

The harder work is still ahead, though: holding ourselves to that vision and executing it.

End of Season 4

After a little bit of this....

(yes we did sell pops when it was SNOWING, never again please)

We did a little bit of this....

(closing down the shops for the season)

Tomorrow, there'll be a little bit of this...

(Joel & Danielle GET MARRIED!!!!)

and then, we'll all experience a little bit of this...

Thanks for another GREAT season, y'all!

We're out!

(keep in touch....lots of good stuff brewing.......)

Season ends soon!

And now, a little poetic interlude....

Summertime came and went

But thanks for all the times well spent!

Unfortunately our time is almost through

Making our delicious ICE POPS for you!

So stock up now, while you still can

Before everything's packed away in our People's Pops van....

The fabulous Christine wrote this poem to commemorate the end of our *fourth* season, which mostly ends Oct 15, although we'll stay open in Chelsea Market until Halloween.

We're sad to go. This summer's been amazing! Our business doubled, our shops tripled, our staff quadrupled. Nathalie's toenail, which turned black from where she dropped an ice block on it in May, has finally grown back to normal. Time flies when you're having fun! Through it all, we kept our eyes on the prize: delicious pops, busy shops, great service, good times.

Who made the times so good? The troopers listed below, our 2011 crack team of perpetually smiling, very sexy, strong-as-oxen ice mongers. I present you:

Rue Snider	Meghan Sebold	Jack O'Brien
Charlie Stopek	Charlie Smith	Christine Wang
Malcolm Barrett	Sharlena Powell	Ben Silbert
Clyde Loving-Cortes	Gasky Joseph	Jaymie O'Brien
Danelle Snider	Katie Traynor	Michael Caglione
Kaitlin Winter	Justin Manley	Brian Austin
Darren Fiorello	Eamonn McMahon	Marilyn Stout

I wish I had a group photo from our midsummer party to post here, but I drank too much to remember to take one. Maybe it's best left undocumented.

But hark! It's a miraculous 80 degrees in New York as I write this (October 8), ideal ice-pop temperature. So why are you reading this? Go out and eat some pops while you still can!

Photo Shoot at Nat's Apartment

After the high last week of having achieved our lifelong dream of prime real estate on New York Magazine's approval matrix, this week's photo shoot with photographer Jennifer May and prop stylist Alana Chernila was icing on the cake.

Alana transformed my apartment into a prop shop that was everything we'd wished for: stylish, retro, imaginative, whimsical.

Caught mid-photo, the fabulous Jennifer May, with husband Chris in the background.

Lunch break for Korean food from across the street.

Joel putting some finishing touches on a cantaloupe & Campari shot.

Our type of pièce montée.

Blow-drying for the ice-pop equivalent of bed-head, that just-so sheen.

Blueberry & moonshine mise en scène.

Last shot of the day.

Such fun!!

Our last photo day is this Sunday, Aug 14th. Come by the Williamsburg Flea after 3 p.m. in brightly colored clothes--we'll comp your pop if you smile for our picture!

Scenes from the Summer

Cool fish-eye pic of Clyde at our East Village shop sent by popsi-fan Anna Kelman.

Megan, Sharlena, Katie & Joel getting buck wild in the kitchen while preparing custom pops for Grey Goose Vodka.