The secret to making the best pops in the world. 🤫

I started experimenting with popsicle flavors around this time 15 years ago. I had lost my job as a Product Analyst during the Great Recession, and somehow decided to start a handcrafted popsicle company.

By April 1, 2010 King of Pops was up and running.

Over the last 15 years we’ve made hundreds of flavors. We’ve officially lost count, but unofficially my best guess is 777. In the early years we were making pops at a prolific rate based on a variety of inputs.

• What we thought would taste good.

• What was in season.

• What we thought would sell well.

• What was on sale. (farmer’s would oftentimes get stuck with way too much of something and once it was fully ripe it had to go)

• What would create a great story.

Taste is king in our world, but the thing about taste is that it is subjective.

Times have changed, but we’re still making new pops every week. I’m biased, but I think we make the best pops in the world. We have an amazing R&D person, a room full of folks who have opinions to share and business goals to meet, and our secret weapon - the Frosty Freaks (the folks that make them)

Our experience has helped us to improve our hit rate, and most pops that we put out objectively taste ‘good.’ A couple per year really hit on all levels selling out quickly and creating buzz. Those successes make us scratch our heads and wonder about the others that we applied the same strategy and care towards.

However, the hype around our pops in the early days seemed more frequent. I’d always attributed this to external forces; the newness, the demographics of our clientele back then, or personal connections (my mom not surprisingly loves all the pops).

But in reality, I think it was just that we were taking more risks.

We used to crank out 20-30 new flavors a month based out of necessity. We’d have to solve the puzzle of what to do with a random case of plums, five pints of leftover strawberries, a couple pounds of basil, three quarts of grapefruit and a few cantaloupes.

We’d open up the Flavor Bible (best book ever if you don’t already know about it), and see how many we could combine in a way that an expert somewhere decided paired well together. If the leftovers were ripe enough or if the shelf life was almost over we’d throw a Hail Mary and use our own budding flavor expertise to put something new and novel out into the world.

The challenge was super fun, and the random new flavors were fun for our customers too. The intrigue kept them on their toes. They’d excitedly pull up to a cart just to see what was available that day, knowing it may be their last chance ever to get blueberry basil or mango habanero.

My plan for this post was to outline the worst flavors we’ve ever made, but what I realized in the process of writing this is that those bad flavors were key to our success. Our buzz-worthy new flavor drops are directly correlated with the amount of risk and quantity of new flavors we were putting out into the world.

I’ll get to the “top-10 worst flavors ever made at King of Pops” next week. But for now just remember that in order to make something people will go crazy for you probably will have to make a lot more things that people will politely throw in the garbage can … or sometimes spit out.