Seventeen years ago, Manuel Flores and his (now ex-) wife Laura had a simple wish: natural popsicles to feed their young kids during hot Texas summers. “We were very into living healthy and didn’t want to give them anything that had red dye 40 or high fructose corn syrup. We couldn’t find anything that met our needs.” So they made their own and gave some to relatives and neighbors.
“We weren’t trying to make a business. Then someone suggested we try selling them,” he recalls. At the time, he was homeschooling his children, and his wife was a full-time schoolteacher. “We didn’t think it was possible.” Still, they took some sample paletas, Mexican-style popsicles, to a farmers’ market in Austin, where they live. People went over the moon for them, and that was that.
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At first, they made paletas at home, learning on the job, and selling 12 batches weekly of eight different flavors made with simple ingredients using either no sugar or as little as possible. Today, this simplicity remains, though the business has changed over the years. Now called Mom & Pops Frozen Pops, Manuel runs the business alone, making about 4,000 paletas a week for catering clients and local home deliveries.
We spoke with Manuel about running a popsicle business with sustainable leanings at this moment of extreme heat.
What made you interested in simple ingredients farmed in ways that don’t harm the earth?
I went to school in Oregon, which has always been at the forefront of healthy living and eating organically. I really believed in it. When you have your first child, you do so much reading about what to eat and what not to eat. We couldn’t bring ourselves to give the kids anything with any of those ingredients and preservatives.
Did you study anything at school that prepared you for being a popsicle maker?
My degree was in landscape architecture. I worked for state governments, mostly up in Washington State, doing environmental remediation. I learned some about pesticides and herbicides through that. Living in Oregon, you understand the impact of things like clear-cut forestry. I grew up in El Paso, Texas—you don’t know about timber and what the landscape looked like. You just go to the store and buy a 2×4. When you see what it does to the environment, it has an impact. That’s when I understood true price costing—what things really cost and what things can do.
Do you grow food for yourself or the business?
I don’t. I wish I had the time. I grew up on a farm—we had horses for riding and cows and chickens and pigs. I really didn’t want to do any more of that work once I got out of high school.
How has the climate crisis impacted how you approach your job?
We have always been conscious of and guilty about packaging. From the very beginning we thought, Can we come up with some sort of wax paper packaging? We are always looking for something biodegradable that is reusable, perhaps. But then you come into the cost factor. We try to use as few labels as necessary to not also add that layer of plastic to the waste stream. If we are at an event, we’ll suggest opening popsicles for you and keep the trash. We do recommend if there is a compost bin, the sticks can go there.
We also collect all of our cuttings. We use watermelons and pineapples, and anything that has any sort of waste to it, we take it to a local community garden, and they turn it into compost.
How do you source your fruit and other ingredients? Are you able to mostly buy from local farms?
We go to local grocery stores. We get herbs and more at farmers’ markets—basil, beets, maybe mint. Whenever we can, the ingredients are organic. Frozen organic strawberries are from Costco. Organic dairy is from there or one of the farmers. In the last few years, we have seen a dip in organic and even regular mango. At times of the year it’s almost unavailable, so we pivot and do other flavors. We use a lot of coconut milk. I prefer an organic version that doesn’t have guar gum or any of those types of preservatives. We see at the farmers’ markets that people are looking for as few ingredients as possible—and real clean. This goes for people of all ages and all income levels. We try to keep the pops affordable. They are $3.50.
Does weather impact what you make?
Business goes up and down in colder months. We do hot drinks with the same ingredients: Mexican hot chocolate, apple rosemary cider, coconut chai with yaupon holly, a tree native to Central Texas. It’s the only caffeinated plant in North America. With the taxes on imports and fees on coffee and teas, it’s having a revival.
What are the most beloved paleta flavors?
Peachy mango is a seasonal favorite with fresh peaches from Fredericksburg, Texas. Watermelon lime. Hibiscus mint. The original flavors were pulled from our experiences. My wife and I grew up along the U.S.-Mexico border. We would go across the bridge into Mexico and have paletas from the guys pushing carts on the streets: mango, tamarind, coconut, strawberry. Those were our first flavors. Now we get inspiration from everywhere. My kids wanted to go to Sonic, and I said, We can’t go there. So we made them a cherry lime pop that tastes just like Sonic. The cucumber lime mint is like the Limon Pepino Gatorade but with fresh ingredients.
What sustainability measures would you like to implement soon?
The paleta molds are stainless steel, but the containers we mix batches in are plastic. I’m looking for something else. I have been reading about microplastics. I’d like all our vehicles to be electric or just human-powered. For now, we buy used cars and try in our routing to hit as many places as we can without having to make multiple trips. And no, we can’t ship them to you. We don’t want to be packing in polystyrene foam and sending them off in dry ice.
What do you love about your job?
We are always dealing with a happy occasion. Every Sunday, the first customer at the market is this little girl, she can’t be more than two, and she always has strawberry milkshake [a seasonal flavor]. Her parents say, Do your dance—a shake—and she does it. Those moments take me back to when our kids were this size. It’s not just kids. The majority of our sales are to adults. When we’re doing a corporate event and we show up with a cart and ring the bell, it always makes everyone’s day.
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