Teaneck—When Sophia Cohen, a young mother in Brooklyn, started making sorbet at home in June 2012, during a very hot Shavuot season, she didn’t imagine that it was just the beginning of a successful entrepreneurial career. “All the kids kept coming from the block. We have a very open block. My sister said, ‘You should really start selling this.’ It seemed really hard to manage something frozen, but she gave me a nice push, and I got a lot of requests,” she told The Jewish Link.
Soon, Cohen hoped to turn her popular sorbets into popsicles, so friends, family and her newly developing customer base could choose their flavors and potentially mix and match their favorites. She hoped it would become a nice side business, as she and her husband both had jobs outside the home. “I turned around to my husband and told him I would really like to buy molds. We were really pressed for money, so it was not an easy decision. He says he remembers saying no, but I remember him saying yes,” she laughed. At that time, she would release a flavor list every Wednesday evening, customers would text back orders, and then the couple would work around the clock filling orders for pickup on Fridays.
Cohen remembers the birth of her business as a labor of love, but it didn’t come without a ton of hard work. “It’s a full-time job being a mother, but then my husband and I worked in our kitchen until 3 a.m. almost every single night. We worked, sometimes even with a baby in the BabyBjorn,” developing flavor combinations, building consistent, reliable recipes and lulling the baby to sleep to the din of multiple blenders. The Cohens had two more children while they incubated their business and filled orders from home (at that time, working with a rabbi who provided home kashruth supervision), according to increasing demand. “It was a frightening transition, but all transitions are frightening,” she said. “My entire first nine months of Urban Pops I was pregnant; when I gave birth to my son in June 2013, it was almost like I gave birth to a baby and a business! The second baby was born in December 2015. I also have three more girls,” she explained.
Cohen added that when she speaks to young women who are interested in starting their own food business, she warns them that they will work harder than they can imagine. “You have to put in more than you expect,” she explained.
Since Cohen made her first pop in October 2012, she has made thousands upon thousands, creating the brand Urban Pops, a cult favorite from Brooklyn that boasts dedicated fans not just at home but in Monsey, the Five Towns, Lakewood, Deal and beyond. Just in time for the chagim, Urban Pops debuted exclusively in northern New Jersey at Teaneck’s Cedar Market and in Queens at Aron’s Kissena Farms. Even now, Urban Pops operates without a dedicated website, but rather publicizes shop and concession opening times and new flavors via a loyal and enthusiastic fan base on Instagram and Facebook. Orders can be made online for the Brooklyn location via an online service.
“Cookie dough, cookies ’n cream and s’mores are the top, most in-demand flavors,” said Yossi Hollander, owner of Cedar Market and Aron’s Kissena Farms, who helped create the partnership and worked to bring Urban Pops to his stores. While he agreed that the fruit flavors are delicious, one can find fruit pops in the kosher marketplace already. For him, it’s the premium specialty combination flavors that “are interesting, unique flavors, and nobody else has them. The limonana, for example, has pieces of nana [mint] in it. It’s so good,” he said.
Hollander added that Urban Pops became a sought-after commodity when it first became available and people were often at a loss as to where to find it. “It’s a crazily desired product here in the neighborhood. People were running to Deal, some people were running to the Five Towns, to Brooklyn; it was a commodity that people were like, ‘Oh, if you’re going to [one of those places], will you pick me up some Urban Pops?’”
“Now, people from Monsey are coming here [to Cedar Market] for it,” added Hollander.
“There’s exotic flavors and there’s more basic and she keeps changing it up. She has a lot of flavors and she’s growing. It’s sort of like an awesome Jewish kosher cult,” said Eli Langer, chief marketing officer at Cedar Market and Aron’s Kissena Farms. “The Jewish foodies are just incredibly enthusiastic. And once you tap into what people want, week after week at the Shabbos table, it goes from being a Yom Tov treat to ‘Mom, please can you get the Urban Pops?’ And the mom is like, ‘Okay…,’ but really the parents want it too,” joked Langer.
Cohen and her husband, Gary, now work full-time on Urban Pops, which now has multiple employees. It has grown by leaps and bounds since they transitioned into a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn in May 2015. The home kitchen, which held seven commercial freezers, was tiny in comparison to the commercial kitchen, which has almost double the freezer space and is certified by the OK. The company is now well known to kosher foodies for its all-natural, premium ingredients, imaginative flavor combinations and vibrant bursts of fruit. Urban Pops has storefront concessions in Brooklyn, Cedarhurst and Deal and delivers once a week to other locations. “We also deal with caterers all the time, and have helped cater events as far as Miami and Chicago,” Cohen said.
What’s special about Urban Pops is that it needs to be served fresh, within two weeks, as Cohen does not use corn syrup, food colorings or preservatives. She works hard on flavor development and ensures proper cold storage of her product to keep the product tasting as intended. Cohen noted she uses only premium Callebaut chocolate and cocoa, the kosher gold standard (“Great chocolate, but very, very expensive,” she said), and high-quality, premium fresh and frozen fruits. She does not use non-dairy creamer or whip, but rather all her creamy pops contain coconut milk. Cohen’s products are not nut-free. Eggs and gluten are only present in the cake and brownie add-ins. However, she noted, the staff and she are careful about cross-contamination and encourages those with food allergies to be in touch with any specific concerns.
“They take the quality very seriously. In Queens, at one point, the freezer broke; the ice was causing items in one corner to be freezer-burned. A customer told her about it and she immediately sprang into action and asked us to fix it. She is very passionate about maintaining quality, as are we, which is what makes this a fantastic relationship,” said Langer.
Langer added that Urban Pops is a result of the two stores constantly looking out for and making room for new products and flavors to share with their customers, who also are free to make requests (“We get dozens of new product requests each month,” he added). Urban Pops are one of a few exciting new items on shelves this fall. Also new, for example, is a similarly gourmet artisanal popcorn product called Popinsanity, which includes offbeat, candy-inspired flavors such as chocolate peanut butter, chocolate salted caramel, classic caramel with sea salt, cinnamon swirl with white chocolate, Granny Smith apple, orange creamsicle, cookies ’n cream, s’mores and cashew truffle. Langer noted that Popinsanity popcorns are certainly delicious and unique, and in the same gourmet family as Urban Pops, indicating that Cedar Market and Kissena Farms customers are showing more of an interest in these types of premium products.
Urban Pops favorite flavors number into the dozens, but the candy-inspired flavors are all pareve and include peanut butter chocolate-dipped pretzel, vanilla brownie, creamsicle, cookies ’n cream, s’mores, salted caramel, cookie dough and several flavors reminiscent of Butterfinger, Almond Joy and Peppermint Patty candy bars. Fruit-flavor favorites include chocolate-dipped strawberry, chocolate-dipped raspberry, toasted coconut, strawberry shortcake, cantaloupe, blood orange, valencia orange, lychee, mango, apricot, limonana, raspberry lemonade and sour cherry. Other specialty flavors include pumpkin pie coated in a graham cracker “crust,” baked apple crisp, which is made from baked apples cooked with brown sugar and coated with homemade granola (“It really tastes like hot apple pie,” said Cohen) and vanilla cone, which is a creamy vanilla gelato with big bits of chocolate-dipped and undipped sugar cone.
Mini-pops are $2.50 and mini-premium flavors are $3.50 (full-size regular and premium pops are $3.00 and $4.00). “Are there ice pops that are cheaper out there? Probably. But you can tell there’s a love that goes into these flavors; they’re truly different,” said Langer. In Queens, Aron’s Kissena Farms has a concession stand and sells single pops, and in Cedar Market, the product is sold in multiples of six (full-size pops) or eight (minis). Cedar Market does not sell mixed packs, but offers over 20 different flavors at any given time.
Has it been difficult to create a cult hit, tapping into exactly what customers want and are willing to travel for? The answer from Cohen is yes. “I look back and don’t know how Hashem gave me a tremendous amount of strength to build this business. Thank God I have my husband. He would come home from work, we would eat dinner, put the kids to bed, and then we would work.”
Now, as it’s a full-time job for both Cohens, it has its new set of challenges as well. “There is a lot of decision-making required to run a growing business, so it’s a constant decision-making process to grow and maintain quality. I am looking forward to a lot of new things and looking forward to what’s next,” she said.
Find Urban Pops at Cedar Market, in front of the cash registers next to the customer service desk.
By Elizabeth Kratz
