Student entrepreneurs featured on KMSP-TV
“These are not your normal fruit popsicles, and definitely not your average entrepreneurs,” begins a KMSP-TV news story highlighting the skyrocketing success of a frozen pops company started by four St. Olaf College students.
The students — Andrew Sather ’14, Connor Wray ’14, Kilian Wald ’14, and Erik Brust ’14 — started JonnyPops with the support of an Entrepreneurial Grant from the St. Olaf Piper Center for Vocation and Career.
“Everything from just sitting and talking about what kind of a business we could run to prototyping and creating the first samples in a dorm-room kitchen and handing them out to our friends happened at school,” Wray tells KMSP-TV.
The “all natural, locally made, frozen fruit and cream snack on a stick” is now available in 110 locations across the Midwest, including the Minnesota Zoo and Holiday gas stations. The entrepreneurs have also had interest in their product from vendors on the West Coast and recently built their own production facility.
A portion of every JonnyPops sale goes to the Hazelden Foundation, which helps those suffering from drug addiction.
“Customers are eating it up, and these college seniors couldn’t be prouder,” says KMSP-TV reporter Leah Beno.
JonnyPops has also garnered the attention of KSTP and the Star Tribune, among other media outlets.