Loco Like a Fox (News & Observer article)

Makes me want to go back for a second field trip!

Published: May 31, 2006 12:30 AM
Modified: May 31, 2006 06:06 AM

Loco like a fox
Mexican-inspired frozen confections draw on local produce
Susan Houston, Staff Writer
DURHAM - The idea for LocoPops was, founder Summer Bicknell would admit, just plain loco. If she had submitted her plan for a grade in business school, "I would have flunked," Bicknell says. "I had a business plan that bore no resemblance to reality."
Yet here she sits on a sunny afternoon, on a bench outside her Hillsborough Road shop, as customers stream past and into the door. She doesn't advertise, doesn't have a Web site, doesn't take credit cards. Yet Triangle residents have gone loco for LocoPops, Bicknell's unique twist on paletas (pah-LAY-tahs), Mexican-style frozen treats on a stick.

Emily and Gail Vaughn of Raleigh are finishing up their second LocoPops outside the store (cookies and cream and strawberries and cream, respectively).

"The plan is you get two small ones ..." Gail Vaughn begins.

"That way you get to try more flavors," daughter Emily finishes.

Emily's sister, a Duke graduate, introduced the rest of the family to LocoPops. Now they are hooked. When her mother visited Emily in Mexico last summer, they sampled the local paletas.

"And she said, 'This is just like the place in Durham,' " Emily recalls.

Inside, a big whiteboard behind the counter lists the 22 flavors available today, evenly divided between paletas de crema (made with milk and cream) and paletas de agua (made with water).

There's also a hand-drawn globe with the slogan, "Blending the traditions of Mexico with the flavors of the world."

"If you want to boil down the concept of LocoPops, it's that," Bicknell says.

The "traditions of Mexico" are seen in the list of "regulars": creamy lime (like a Key lime pie on a stick), mojito, tamarind, hibiscus and mango chile -- a fruity, spicy favorite in Mexico.

"I had the mango chile in Mexico, and hers is just right," Emily confirms.

"The flavors of the world" show Bicknell's facility with flavors. There are two "FUNky" flavors each week (pear cardamom and rosemary lemon last week) and about a dozen "guest stars" such as chocolate chile, coconut ginger and pineapple basil.

And this year, many of the herbs used to flavor these unusual combinations will come from the Durham garden of SEEDS (South Eastern Efforts Developing Sustainable Spaces), a nonprofit group that encourages urban children and teens to get involved in organic gardening.

Nathan Baines, 18, a junior at Southern High School, is one of those teens. Through DIG (Durham Inner City Gardeners), Baines is already tending rosemary, lavender, peppermint, lemon verbena and several varieties of basil that will eventually flavor LocoPops. Spearmint and thyme will follow this summer, when Baines will intern with Bicknell at LocoPops, learning about the business and perhaps creating his own flavors.

His dream, you see, is to be a chef.

Before DIG, "I didn't have herbs and stuff to cook with," Baines says. Now, although he says "people at school, they be laughing" at the notion, Baines likes to grow herbs like rosemary and use them to flavor chicken.

And his herbs will flavor LocoPops. "At first, I said, 'Dude, that's going to be nasty,' " Baines admits. But now he respects the creativity behind LocoPops. "Nobody else is trying nothing like that," he says.

For her part, Bicknell is glad to be a SEEDS partner. Acknowledging that many of her exotic flavors would have to come from far away, she looked for ways to buy local when she could. The ice cream mix for her milk-based paletas comes from Jackson's Dairy in Spiveys Corner.

"It's part of our corporate strategy," says LocoPops partner Connie Semans of Durham.

The partnership with SEEDS is "in line with where I'd like to see the world," Bicknell says.

It was at the SEEDS fundraiser Art Grows in Durham last summer that LocoPops, which will celebrate its one-year anniversary Saturday, made its debut.

The year before that, Bicknell was doing "the corporate gig" in Nashville, Tenn., putting her MBA to use in middle management -- and feeling stuck in a rut. She wanted to do something else, but what? Bicknell confided her frustration to a friend visiting from Atlanta. At the time, they were sharing some paletas purchased from a shop in Nashville run by two sisters from Guadalajara.

"I bet you could learn how to make these," he told her.

"So it's his fault," Bicknell says.

She talked to the sisters who ran the paleta shop and did some research on the Internet. She decided she wanted to learn how to make paletas the authentic way, in Mexico -- even though all the Spanish she knew were the numbers from one to 20.

"My minimum criteria was that I was not going to cross the border until I had a name," Bicknell says. She got that name by e-mail from the publisher of an online journal who had mentioned a paleteria in Tlazazalca, a town in the southwest Mexico state of Michoacan.

Soon, Bicknell had sold her house in Nashville, packed up her two dogs and headed to Tlazazalca. She showed up on the doorstep of the paleta maker, "who realized I was sincere," and spent the next three months as a paleta apprentice.

"She taught me how to make them and let me live behind the shop," Bicknell says. After learning her trade, she spent the next three months learning Spanish.

She also thought about where she wanted to open her own shop. She didn't want to go back to Nashville and compete with the women who had inspired her. She narrowed the possibilities to states on the Eastern Seaboard, eliminating Florida because of its already burgeoning Mexican population.

On the drive through her target zone, headed to New Jersey, she stopped in Durham to buy gas. "And I agreed with myself to stop here again on the way back," she says. She stopped and she stayed, leasing a house and, a few months later, the shop where she would sell her paletas.

"It looks like genius now," she says of the location, about halfway between Duke's West campus and trendy Ninth Street. "But it was just providence."

LocoPops' success, like Blanche Dubois, has also been dependent on the kindness of strangers.

"Something you can't put into a business plan is good will," Bicknell says.



Food editor Susan Houston can be reached at 829-4863 or shouston@newsobserver.com