From crop to pop

WHEN Steven Carse began hawking ice lollies on a corner in Atlanta, one of his best customers was a lawyer representing Unilever. Mr Carse’s brand name was King of Pops, but his marketing used the word Popsicle—a trademark indirectly acquired by the conglomerate from a Californian who, as a child, accidentally invented the delicacy on a wintry night in 1905. The lawyer would serve him “cease and desist” notices, Mr Carse recalls. But she always bought some pops, too.

That was in 2010, when he was 25. He had abandoned a brief stint in Idaho as a journalist and returned to Georgia, where he grew up, to be a data analyst for an insurance firm. Losing that job in a post-crash cull, he reverted to selling candyfloss at baseball games, as he had in college: good practice, he says, for making eye contact and ten-second sales. Hoping to buy a pop-freezing machine, he became embroiled with a Cypriot businessman in West Palm Beach, who undertook to import one from Brazil (he didn’t). He made his pops by night in a shared Atlanta kitchen, lugging a cart to his corner to sell them by day.

Soon his brother, Nick, ditched his career as a prosecutor and joined him. Six years on, Mr Carse reckons he may hit annual sales of 2m lollies. King of Pops is still a family concern: his dad deals with wholesale distribution—they deliver for other outfits as well—while his mum oversees collections. But it now has around 100 street vendors in eight cities, supplies hundreds of retailers and runs a catering arm.

Much of this success came from hard work. But evolutions in taste, and in Atlanta itself, have contributed. The supremacy of King of Pops is also a parable of trends in consumerism and in urban living.

Mr Carse traces his enthusiasm for pops to the trips he made to Latin America to visit his other brother, an anthropologist. He ate lots of paletas, Popsicle-esque treats that make use of otherwise superfluous produce. Those origins suggest one advantage pops offer startups: low overheads and, potentially, high margins. Twitter helped Mr Carse to realise those, letting him inform his customers where his cart was and which flavours he was peddling.

Meanwhile, as in other places, growing numbers of Atlantans have been attracted by his reliance on local ingredients. At first he bought at farmers’ markets, but two years ago King of Pops invested in its own farm—King of Crops—30 miles west of the city. Touring it, Mr Carse points out peppers used in pineapple habanero, cucumbers soon to be mixed with lime and lemongrass with coconut. These exotic combinations are part of another relevant shift: the rise of posh street food, driven by enlightened licensing authorities, a cohort of shoestring entrepreneurs and diners looking for low-cost sophistication.

Coincidentally, in Atlanta as elsewhere, more people are getting around by foot or bicycle; in a related change, more young professionals are choosing to live in town, often with their pop-happy offspring. The King of Pops’ HQ and kitchen has a window counter on the BeltLine, a converted railway trail that is the axis of Atlanta’s redevelopment. A mile up, it has opened a bar in a revamped mall. On Tuesdays hundreds of people gather on the BeltLine for a King of Pops-sponsored yoga class. It has become the flagship brand of a newly pedestrianised lifestyle.

How far can Mr Carse’s pops go, before their hip and eco-credentials melt? Once he couldn’t afford a store; now King of Pops has bricks-and-mortar outlets in Atlanta, Charleston, Charlotte and Richmond. From the farm to the carts, it is an integrated crop-to-pop producer: a bold, unusual model that might prove impractical on a bigger scale. And between King of Crops, Poptails (cocktails, frozen and otherwise) and King of Pups (icy dog treats), it may be reaching its alliterative limit.

For now, Mr Carse hopes that—within the South, with its long pop season—it can continue to take in roughly a city a year. In any case, King of Pops is already an institution, a status that might take decades to acquire in other cities but in Atlanta, novelty-seeking and hungry for hometown champions, can be won at speed. Two recent events sealed it. Dad’s Garage, a local theatre, put on a musical in which the King of Pops does battle with a corporate villainess, the Ice Queen of Cones. Then in May the city’s mega-brand, Coca-Cola, enlisted the firm to make a celebratory float for its 130th anniversary. On the wrapper a Coke bottle sports a King of Pops crown.