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San Fernando
Wednesday, Mar 27, 2024

Tastes of the Tropics Mix In Ice Cream

Marthin Ken opened his popular ice cream shop with love in mind – but not for making ice cream. He had never made ice cream prior to starting the San Fernando business a year ago last month, and he had no intention of learning how. He opened Helados Pops – “helado” is ice cream in Spanish – so his father-in-law Oscar Perez would run the shop and have some income later in life. Perez had owned and operated an ice cream shop for seven years with the same name but lost the business soon after the Great Recession. However, Ken’s go-getter nature took over, he said. “(At first) I just wanted to help my grandma and grandpa – but I got obsessed,” he explained. “And I am very, very competitive. I wanted it to be the best in Los Angeles.” To stand out from the competition, Ken turned to his native Belize and Perez’s El Salvador to find exotic flavors from the fruits of those and other tropical countries. He hunts for them first in local farmers’ markets; and what he can’t find, he imports. Ken then transforms them into ice creams and sorbets with flavors such as soursop, cashew fruit, lucuma, passion fruit, guava and cherimoya. One flavor – sugar corn – was in his blood. Ken’s mother traced it back to a relative who made his own sugar corn ice cream and sold it on the streets of Belize. While the exotic flavors have garnered praise from media outlets such as LA Weekly, and countless fans comment on Yelp with phrases like “freaking delicious” – they can sometimes present challenges. The cashew nut fruit, for instance, has such a delicate and subtle flavor that Ken has to buy a lot of it for the recipes, and then has to spend hours hand-peeling its very acidic skin so it doesn’t ruin the ice cream. He now finds himself hunting the world for top-grade ingredients and spending a lot of money for items such as the half-pound of vanilla beans from Papua New Guinea he just bought for $170. Helados Pops has encountered marketing and advertising challenges as well. To increase foot traffic on the shop’s ultra-quiet location at 450 N. Maclay Ave., he brought in a musician to play to those sitting outside. He also had to make Helados Pops’ creations more photo worthy for social media, and now carves out real coconut halves to serve as natural ice cream and sorbet bowls. “So that’s how I managed to do cool and yummy,” Ken said. The experience is cultivating in him a new appreciation of small businesses, Ken said. “I respect small businesses because nothing makes you do it but love,” he added. – Carol Lawrence

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