Interview with Erik Brust
Photos courtesy of  JonnyPops

Erik Brust, cofounder and CEO of JonnyPops, explains how his company delivers not only incredibly tasty organic frozen treats but also positivity.

How did this idea come about?
My cousin Jonathan, who was a few years older than me, and I came up with this idea of an all-natural smoothie-on-a-stick pop when I was in high school. Tragically, he passed away at the beginning of the second wave of the opioid crisis. When I was a sophomore at St. Olaf College here in Minnesota, I pitched the idea to some friends, and we started making pops in our dorm in 2011. We sold them weekly at ten farmers markets, where we also bought our ingredients. After graduating, Connor [Wray, cofounder and CFO] and I went full-time with it. We just have a blast making pops.

Tell us a little about your pops:
Our original smoothieon- a-stick products still have only five ingredients: fruit, cream, water, cane sugar, and a pinch of salt. We also now make fun water pops, a unique type of treat with layers of flavor. In fact, we have both a design patent and a process patent for them; we earned the latter because we built totally custom machinery to make these multilayered pops. We’re pretty proud about being able to come up with such an innovation.

What is your ultimate goal with JonnyPops?
We’ve never been short on ambition, but this isn’t necessarily about becoming the biggest ice-cream company on the planet. We simply want to make a great product and have a positive impact. That said, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by JonnyPops’ staying power—we have hundreds of thousands of loyal fans who support us. It just goes to show that there’s always room in the market for a great product to succeed.

Your slogan is “A Better Pop for a Better World.” Would you elaborate on what this means to you?
There are two sides to that promise. First, we always want to produce something we would feel good about eating and sharing with other people. That’s why we keep it as simple as possible with just a few great ingredients—as the saying goes, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The second part of our mission statement is about always being transparent. For example, a lot of people have food allergies, including my sister, who grew up with a deathly peanut allergy. So we have an entirely peanut-free facility where we manufacture everything ourselves. We go as far as not even allowing people to bring in peanut butter sandwiches for their lunches. We also came out with an oat milk line for those who are lactose intolerant.

How much do you lean on customer input?
Honestly, what’s made JonnyPops successful is that we’ve always sought consumer feedback. Our entire brand is set up that way—rather than tell people what they want, we listen to what they want and then make it. Hundreds of people reach out to us every day to tell us about something they love or don’t love about us.

Have you always put good deeds on your pops’ sticks?
From the start, we wanted to focus on positivity and antibullying: to get people to be kinder to each other. So in 2014, we started adding good deeds to our sticks, and kindness became the center of everything we do.

Our fans responded once again, offering up their own ideas for good deeds and sharing the ones they did, from taking the road less traveled to making time to play with a pet to sending a postcard while on vacation. These are small things, but I’m a big believer that small things can lead to big change. Our pops can be the first domino that leads to unintended positive consequences for people—and it all starts with words on wood. It’s pretty amazing.

What is your Kindness Is Golden campaign?
It debuted in 2020 and was another result of listening. People were collecting their sticks, washing them, putting them in containers, and then pulling out random ones for activity ideas. Inspired by this, we came up with the idea of allowing fans to redeem sticks for prizes: everything from T-shirts to an all-inclusive factory tour where you also design your own flavor. That was a fun project to implement. We’re planning to ramp it up in a huge way over the next couple of years.

Tell us a little about your education initiatives:
We make a version of our product for K–12 schools that meets USDA smart-snack school nutrition guidelines; as a result, over ten million students enjoy JonnyPops in more than forty states. We also provide things like a free antibullying campaign and curriculum for educators on our website and mail “I got caught doing something kind today” stickers to schools. The impact we can make in schools through these initiatives is so meaningful to us.

Since the beginning, you’ve donated to organizations that focus on addiction recovery. Would you elaborate on that?
We honor Jonathan by donating to such nonprofits, which helps give people access to things like treatment and scholarships. There’s still a stigma about mental health and addiction, and breaking that down is one of the most important things you can do. If we can use a brand voice to do that, great, but we help more behind the scenes in that capacity and are more focused on kindness and antibullying overall.

How many pops can you make a day now?
Each day, we are producing thousands of pops, which is just crazy to think about. Even if only 10 percent of our fans do the good deeds on their pops, that still means thousands of good deeds are being done every day. That gets me excited about the future of the company and the world.

Which products do people love the most?
The water pops are fun just because they’re so eye-catching, and they’re very popular in summer. And people have always loved the strawberry-and-cream pop. It’s a pure, delicious, strawberry ice-cream treat, and I’d confidently say we do it better than anyone on the planet.

What’s next for JonnyPops?
We’re in this to keep learning, growing, and coming up with great products. The team is looking to add more fun flavors and ideas adjacent to frozen pops. There’s no idea too crazy or too big—I have whiteboards and notebooks full of dreams. So you will see a lot more from our business in the next five to ten years.

For more info, visit jonnypops.com