How Leila Keshavjee turned a craving for healthy snacks into a popsicle empire

At the start of 2016, I was completing my bachelor’s degree in Exercise Physiology at the University of Toronto. I was also working part-time as a research assistant and gymnastics coach, and had been accepted into a master’s program. Life was busyI was pretty much living off smoothies I made myself.

That spring, I decided to take up a new hobby: making my own healthy popsicles. I noticed a lack of snack options with less sugar and additives in grocery stores, so I decided to give it a try. I rented a small commercial space owned by my family near my home in Toronto and got to work. For my first batch, I made 50 popsicles by mixing a base of fresh mango, water, lemon juice, and organic cane sugar, then froze them. I’m South Asian Canadian, so fresh fruit was a staple snack in my household growing up. We always had fruit in the fridge.

The popsicles turned out amazingly delicious, so I decided to try selling them at my local farmers market. I was so happy to see people enjoying the treats that I bought more equipment on Kijiji and started taking coolers full of popsicles to more farmers markets. Happy Pops.

By the fall, despite having no entrepreneurial experience, I put my studies on hold to join the Impact Centre, an incubator program at the University of Toronto. I then secured catering contracts with clients like Google, Scotiabank, and Aeroplan. I then launched in local food establishments like Summerhill Market in Toronto.

In 2018, looking for new avenues for growth, I Dragon’s Lair On a whim, I ended up on the show and was offered $150,000 for 30 percent of the company by Arlene Dickinson. I accepted the deal on air, but then decided not to go ahead because I wasn’t ready to give up such a big part of the business. Still, that show was a big moment for me. Up until that point, I’d hesitated to tell people that I’d dropped out of school to become a food entrepreneur because it sounded like such a spontaneous change of direction. Getting Happy Pops on TV was a turning point for the business.

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This exposure helped me expand. I invested the money I earned in renting a larger commercial space with more freezer capacity, hiring a production team and accountant, outsourcing marketing and design, and developing new flavors like passion fruit, guava, matcha, lychee lemonade, orange & cream, and lemon mint. Meanwhile, I was pitching to some of the largest grocers in Canada. In 2019, Sobeys began carrying Happy Pop in their Ontario stores and eventually rolled it out across the country. Metro followed suit in 2020 with stores in Ontario and Quebec. We started shipping across the US in coolers with dry ice. Being able to ship across Canada and fulfill orders from our new e-commerce store has kept us going through the pandemic.

Seven years into this business, some things have remained the same — I’m still the sole owner of Happy Pops, our basic recipes are still the same, and we still sell at farmers’ markets on weekends — but there’s one thing I couldn’t have predicted: we partnered with Aeroplan to create custom flavors. Sesame streetThe company is also currently developing a limited edition popsicle for Mattel, scheduled to be released later this year. The company produces more than one million popsicles annually and is sold in 1,500 grocery stores across Canada, as well as attractions such as Canada’s Wonderland and Ripley’s Aquarium.

Yet our team remains small. We just hired our first administrative assistant. In addition to making business decisions, I still Manage social media I also develop and test flavors. It keeps me busy, but I’ve gotten better at balancing work and life by carving out time during the day to ride my bike, play golf, and spend time with family and friends. Hearing that people love my popsicles and knowing that kids can have a quality snack that they didn’t have when I was a kid makes it all worth it.