Cooling off with gourmet freezies
Jon’s Pops offer better ingredients, but getting kids on board is a tougher sell
It shouldn’t take much to improve on a freeze pop, a.k.a. freezie, a.k.a. the poor man’s Popsicle. After all, they are almost invariably of the lowest quality: just sickly sweet, artificially flavoured coloured ice inside a clear plastic sleeve. In bulk, they sell for under a dollar a pop, which is still a significant markup considering the low-grade ingredients and minimal packaging.
In recent years there have been small advancements in freezie tech, with exotic (artificial) flavours, sugar-free options as well as some with real fruit juice, but they remain rare. Mostly what you’ll find in the freez- er-burnt unit of the nearest corner store are the colours and flavours you remember from childhood, ones today’s kids have learned to crave come summertime.
This is where Jonathan Silver comes in. The 27-year-old master of philosophy grad-turned-food entrepreneur believed the freezie was “a fairly easy product to fix and make better.”
He started with the packaging. Remember how the sharp edges of the plastic on a jumbo freezie would cut the sides of your mouth?
“That’s just bad design,” Silver says. His product’s plastic sleeves have smooth edges with no lip-slicing flaps along the sides. What a concept!
He began producing small batches of Jon’s Popslast summer, using hyper-local ingredients including foraged pears and cherries, in collaboration with Toronto’s Not Far From The Tree.
He has since expanded his line with products not dependent on frontlawn harvests, now sold at a dozen locations around town. You will probably never find them at 7-Eleven. Oh yeah, and they’re $3 a pop, a price more in line with the gourmet ingredients.
So did Silver improve upon summer’s most enduring yet flawed treat? It depends who you ask. If you ask me, yes. But where freezies are usually an explosion of high-fructose corn syrup and fake fruit flavour — making kids want to suck out the juice faster than the pops can melt — Jon’s Pops are subtle, not so sweet, and meant for slow savouring. The black tea flavour tastes like iced tea with just a bit of sweetness. Rosehipand-hibiscus dares to be tart before the sugar kicks in. A synthetically flavoured cherry or cream soda free- zie would never take such chances with our taste buds.
For this reason, kids who are used to the real (fake) thing will be less excited by the prospect of a Jon’s Pop. To them we shrug and say: suck it up, kid. Would I eat it again? I would, and I’d probably shame you into eating one too.