When he was preparing fresh horseradish-crusted halibut and oysters Rockefeller in the kitchen at Felicia Suzanne’s Restaurant, Chris Taylor didn’t dream he’d one day be making flavored ice pops — or that they’d be synonymous with outdoor Memphis events.
Taylor, 48, is the founder/owner of Mempops, the iconic frozen treat available from his 15 carts and five Airstream trailers around town.
They’re also for sale at his brick-and-mortar shops at 1243 Ridgeway Road and in Crosstown Concourse, along with Mempops merch, including caps and T-shirts.
It may be hard to believe, but Mempops has been around for 10 years.
Taylor came up with the idea in 2015. “I saw people in other cities doing it,” he says. He thought, “I can do that, make it out of my house … go around to places.”
“One day I decided to quit my job and go full-time,” Taylor says.
Having grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, Taylor graduated from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He majored in economics but wasn’t sure what career he was going to pursue: “I didn’t know — a banker or financial guy.
“I worked for a bank for three months. I think I had to tuck my shirt in, wear a collared shirt, which is not my style.”
Then a friend he went to college with suggested Taylor move to California and help him with his corn maze, a fall/Halloween attraction where people try to find their way out of a complicated mass of corn stalks. His friend said, “This is a good business. You can make some money.”
“It happened to be at a time when I was not employed. He said, ‘Come to California and run this for me.’ I went down there and worked in a corn maze.”
The Corn (and Culinary) Maze to Mempops
In 2001, Taylor moved to Memphis and opened Mid-South Maze with Justin Taylor at the Agricenter International. The maze, which is still in operation, was a success.
Around that same time, Taylor began working at Felicia Suzanne’s Restaurant, where he rose from prep cook to sous-chef. Today, Felicia Willett-Schuchardt, who owns Felicia Suzanne’s along with her husband Clay, says she wasn’t surprised when Taylor began Mempops. “Because of [his] love of food, love of product, and love of the nice idea of simplicity. When he told me about his business plan, what he wanted to do, and what he was sourcing, it just seemed natural that was the path he would go down. Because he loved creating. He loved starting with a raw product and not doing a lot to it, and building it from there.”
After about five years at Felicia’s, Taylor left the restaurant to work at Central BBQ. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t fine dining,” he says. “I started working there to learn how to run a different style restaurant. Then one day I decided I don’t want to do a restaurant; I want to make pops.”
Mempops does “a great job,” says Roger Sapp, co-owner of Central BBQ and Sunrise Memphis. “They’ve got a good business model.”
Sapp remembers when Taylor came to work for him at Central BBQ. “He ran a kitchen and he knew how to do everything,” he says, but “I’d never see him running a business like that. He was quiet. But he was a good chef.”
Taylor also got out of the corn maze business. “I wanted to do my own thing. I hadn’t really figured out what it was going to be.”
That’s when a frozen pops business popped into his mind. “This idea of lots of different events, people seeing you everywhere, the idea of being out and about, as well as having a home base, was intriguing.”
He set up shop at his home. “I started messing around and slowly figuring out recipes and figuring out ratios and that kind of stuff, sugar-to-water ratios and different flavors.”
A Recipe for Success
Taylor began with 10 flavors. He now offers “over 100, if not more.”
Strawberry, which he made with “fresh strawberries, simple syrup, and lemon juice,” was one of his first flavors. Watermelon was another. “Cut off the top of the watermelon, add simple syrup and lemon juice — just a little acid to make it taste better.”
Taylor poured the liquid into stainless steel molds and put them in a deep freezer in his garage. “Next day I’d take them out, seal them, make another batch, freeze them.”
Now, he says, “I have a whole system that freezes them very quickly.”
Back then, he made about 100 pops a day: “[I’d] do it every day,” he says. Then on Sundays he hoped he’d sell them all.
Roasted peach, avocado, lime, pineapple, and coconut were other flavors he came up with in those early days. “It was a lot of trial and error at first. If you know anything about cooking, you’ve got classic French mother sauces. So we kind of created our own. Same thing, but ice pops.”
Taylor came up with a base, which he played around with. He thought, “We can change this couple of ingredients and make a whole new flavor.” “It was a mix-and-match thing,” he says.
He found his first cart “on Craigslist or eBay” and considered what area he would set it up in. During his first event, Taylor did “well enough to keep doing it.”
In the beginning, Taylor would go out with 100 pops a day. “Sometimes I’d sell 50 pops,” he says. “I’d be really happy.”
He didn’t have anybody helping him back then. “It was me,” says Taylor. “I was making the pops and putting the cart on the trailer. [I’d] go to St. Jude one day a week and hang out and make friends with some office staff out there.”
Taylor began approaching more people about selling Mempops at their outdoor events. “First, I was calling people and telling them what I was doing, and they were like, ‘Huh?’”
That went on for about six months. “Within a year, it kind of flipped and people started calling me a lot. It took a while to get out there.”
After he bought his second cart, Taylor was selling 1,000 pops a day. He began buying more freezers. “I kept having to buy bigger machines to make more pops,” he says.
Nine years ago, Taylor signed the lease for his first Mempops store, which was the old Rock’n Dough Pizza & Brewery on Ridgeway Road. He opened the second store about two years later. He and his team of employees make the pops in a 2,000-square-foot kitchen on Summer Avenue.
“I feel like when we started there was kind of a rejuvenation of Memphis and this kind of civic pride built up. People were excited about Memphis. Not to say they aren’t now, but they were doing things — like us having our own homegrown product.”
Local restaurants and farmers markets also were going strong. “It was a combination of civic pride and people wanting to support local businesses. I feel like we just kind of came along at the right time.”
“Let’s Call It Mempops”
Mempops now sets up every day for six months during the warmer months. They do close to 500 events a year, Taylor says.
They use carts as well as Airstream trailers. J.C. Youngblood is the chief operator of the mobile business. “I’ve been in the mix with him since the onset,” says Youngblood, who worked with Taylor at Central BBQ. “I run the mobile side of things. The catering and food trucks and whatnot.”
Youngblood thought Mempops would either be a flash in the pan or “something with some staying power and still be around 20 years down the road.” It looks like it’s “trending toward” the latter, Youngblood says.
Over the years, Youngblood has been involved in hospitality, restaurant, and specialty event-based projects as well as live music, TV, and movie shoots. He sees Mempops as a combination of all of these. Also, he says, “People seldom complain when you give them a pop.”
Taylor’s wife, Emily, is in charge of social media as well as working on the mobile side. “We call her our communications specialist,” Taylor says.
Taylor works 13 hours straight on some days. There are “a lot of moving parts” to Mempops. When he’s not at the kitchen, he’s at the stores. He works events. He will “pick up the slack” when he’s needed.
Monday is the “big prep day” at the Mempops kitchen. They puree the fruits or put them in the juicer. “We use all fresh fruits,” Taylor says.
The mixture is poured into molds. Sticks are inserted into the pops with an extractor before the molds are put in a freezer for 30 minutes. After they’re frozen, the pops are taken out of the molds, put in plastic bags, sealed, put in boxes, labeled, and put in a walk-in freezer.
On a recent Tuesday, people were bustling around the kitchen. One man was cutting up watermelons. Another was using his foot to pump a machine that seals the bags.
Including the “mobile business and everything,” Taylor now has about 45 people working for him. “Most of these are part-time kids.”
He says, “Crews work every day from April to the middle of October. And then it starts slowing down.”
They don’t stop creating Mempops when the weather gets cooler, though. “We do some fun stuff in the winter,” Taylor says. “The menu evolves.”
The cold weather pops include a S’mores pop. They make their own marshmallows for the pops, which are coated with chocolate and graham crackers.
Asked who came up with the name Mempops, Taylor says, “I feel like my wife and I did. I say it was my idea. She says the name was her idea.”
Regardless, he says, “We wanted it to be a Memphis name: Bluff City Pops, River City Pops, [something] like that. But none of that really felt right.”
Then one of them said, “Let’s call it Mempops.”
Flavor and Forward Thinking
Strawberry Lemonade is still their number-one Mempops flavor, Taylor says. “I feel like that’s half of what I make. It’s good. At first I was going to make all these crazy adventurous flavors.”
But he realized people just wanted simpler flavors. “People wanted what they know. I switched gears,” he says. “More traditional flavors. Then we sprinkle in some different stuff here and there.”
Not every new flavor works. “There were a lot that weren’t good in the beginning.” He once made a dragon fruit Mempop. “It was kind of gross,” he says.
Taylor believes working at restaurants was a plus for his Mempops business. “A lot of it is how to run a kitchen — not running a fine dining kitchen, but how to store everything, clean a work space, work flow stuff you learn by working in the kitchen and on the line.”
He also says “knowing where to source things, knowing different people to call, knowing how to order and find the best price” have all come in handy running Mempops.
They sell Mempops at events in other places, including Jackson, Tennessee; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Oxford, Mississippi, where the Double Decker Arts Festival is popular. But mainly they sell Mempops in Memphis. “We’re kind of known here. And when you go to different cities, people are like, ‘What is this?’ They don’t do as well.”
Anyhow, Taylor adds, “We’re busy enough here.”
Mempops were recently spotted for sale at Asian Night Market at the Agricenter and Wagging in Memphis in Handy Park.
They do multiple events on any given day, Taylor says. “We’ve done 15 in a day before.”
Mempops can regularly be found at locations including Cordelia’s Market, Shelby Farms Park gift shop, the Memphis Zoo, and Memphis Botanic Garden.
And more of Taylor’s food-related businesses might be showing up in the future. “My newest idea is deli sandwiches. Just doing everything from home — making our own bacon, smoking our own meats. Traditional sandwiches from around the world-type thing.
“I have all kinds of ideas for restaurants,” Taylor says. “Always. I mean, who knows?”
