King of Pops Owners Look to the Land for Business Expansion

Originally published in the Jan. 22, 2014, issue

 

By Dallas Duncan

 

King of Pops is the king of Georgia Grown gourmet popsicles. With flavor combinations including blueberry lemongrass, tangerine basil, grapefruit mint and pineapple habañero, the company built a business that thrives on locally sourced products.

 

And it’s about to get a lot more local — co-founders Steven and Nick Carse are hiring a farm manager to help them start growing their own ingredients.

 

King of Pops co-founder Nick Carse mans the store window in Atlanta, Ga.,
on a sunny day in January. The popsicles, already made with Georgia-grown
ingredients, will soon contain elements sourced from around the company's
farm. Photo by Dallas Duncan

They haven’t nailed down a farm location yet, but the brothers have lots of plans for when they do.

 

“We want to do honey, berries, melons, herbs and kind of experiment from there,” Steven Carse said. “With greenhouses, we can push the limits more, possibly do persimmon and cherry.”

 

Once they’ve figured out what plants work, he said the remainder of the farm will focus on one or two crops. But first, they have to do soil testing and figure out which of their ingredients will grow best in the ground.

 

"Herbs will be the quickest thing that we’ll be able to get to and grow a good bit of what we’ll use,” Steven Carse said.

 

The goals of the farm are three-fold: take over the company’s produce composting, grow their own ingredients and continue Tree Elves, a living Christmas tree operation that “rents” potted Christmas trees to families during the holidays, and takes care of them the other 11 months of the year. When the trees get too big to deliver to new families, they will be planted, donated or sold.

 

“We’re both pretty big dreamers and we have pretty high goals of what it could eventually be,” Steven Carse said.

 

King of Pops sells about 500,000 popsicles each year, between its carts, catering and retail sales. Inspirations for the unusual flavor concoctions come from everywhere, including creative cocktails. Roughly 50 percent of the produce, all of the dairy and honey ingredients are locally sourced, Steven Carse said.

 

“We go to the State Farmers Market, we deal with Destiny Organics a good bit. Then we do a lot of kind of really small scale with some of the farmers at farmers markets we attend. We get all our peaches from Peterson, all our milk from Southern Swiss in Augusta,” Steven Carse said. “We shoot for as much local as we can get.”

 

Though the business has only been around since 2010 — the inspiration came years before when Steven and Nick visited their elder brother, an anthropologist, and became enamored with a variety of Latin American fruit-based popsicle — its distributors have already taken note of the growing fan base.

 

Destiny Organics is one such distributor.

 

“We see how popular their products are and how well they’re selling,” Communications Director Ben Pruett said. “I think that they’re able to do something that is very unique and I think that being able to produce their own ingredients could really add to the possibilities of the unique market that they’ve already carved out.”

 

Pruett said he believes King of Pops will be the first Destiny Organics producer that grows its own ingredients for a prepared product.

 

“We kind of have somewhat of a responsibility to be outspoken leaders in this because our business model is so closely tied to this,” Steven Carse said. “Almost as important as the food we’re going to be creating is our ability to familiarize our fans with local food in general, sustainable food and using it as a marketing tool and learning experience.”