Melting? Keep cool with Sno Con Amor’s delivery ice pops.

Lauda Flores never thought she’d continue the work of her parents’ paleteria, but here she is making, oh, around 1,000 gourmet ice pops a week. And for the record, the paletas were easier.

Imagine the Otter Pop of your childhood but bursting with fresh ingredients and hours of care and you’ve got Sno Con Amor, Flores’s homespun operation, where each pop gets manually filled and then delivered straight to you. Available in a rainbow of flavors such as watermelon lime, blackberry lemon and mango lassi—nearly all organic and made with fresh pressed juice—the ice pops from the L.A. native with frozen treats in her blood make for some of the city’s most colorful ways to cool down this summer, and they’re just an Instagram DM away.

She’s been a Hollywood Farmers’ Market fixture for the last decade, but Flores took the long way getting back to her ice cream upbringing. “I can’t believe I’m doing this now,” she laughs. “Seriously, it was the last thing I ever imagined. Growing up I was like, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’”

After a career in the film and music industries—and with enough time between herself and a childhood spent filling paleta molds—she needed a break from travel and a way to reconnect to the community, and devised the Sno Con Amor stand: a weekly farmers’ market stall for frosty snow cones colored with a rainbow of homemade syrups. It was only meant to last one summer but turned into her calling.

You might’ve tasted one of her ice pops there, too, a lesser focus made with no less care, but once Angelenos were forced to stay home and the Hollywood Farmers’ Market temporarily closed, she went all-in on the packaged goods. 

“They were always kind of like the ugly stepchild, but it’s ironic that I was already thinking of how I wanted to shift my focus to them,” Flores says. “My whole plan was that I was going to expand my business this year; I was gonna figure it all out, and then the pandemic happened and I was like, “Oh, jump on it, no time to figure it out, just put them out there.’”

Like thousands of other small-business owners across the county, she’s had to find a way to pivot—and in the case of Sno Con Amor, that pivot’s been paying off. Though the Hollywood market has reopened to food vendors, Flores hasn’t yet returned and has, at least for now, flipped her business into a pop-only venture.

These gourmet pops run $4 apiece, but they’re sizable and a fair price for the labor: Each flavor requires its own method and even freezing procedure, and that’s before it’s liquified and poured into a container with a spout that fills the plastic sleeves, one by one. 

Some fruit she juices, some she cooks: For both the strawberry rosewater and strawberry rhubarb pops, she bakes the fruit like you would a pie filling; for the Mexican chocolate, she heats the contents on the stove like you would for hot chocolate, and then she freezes it. For the matcha, Flores uses powder just as you might for a latte or a smoothie, blending it with coconut milk for creaminess and body. The mango lassi uses yogurt and sometimes rosemary, and the most time consuming of all is the orange creamsicle, which not only requires pounds upon pounds of oranges to get juiced, but also the hand-zesting of their rinds.

You can taste them yourself by direct messaging her Instagram account, and she rotates through her 16-or-so flavors every few days, filling up her three freezers and delivering the pops in butcher-paper–wrapped bundles with rates based on mileage (or you can pick them up in Mount Washington, if you’d rather).

Order some and you’ll probably meet Flores herself. The one-woman operation drives them across L.A. and beyond—including to Ojai for one of her “tours,” the Sno Con Amor term for customers ordering pop bundles as gifts for friends and family, many of whom receive them as surprises.

Of course, if you’re anything like us, you’ll probably want to order a dozen just for yourself. After all—you’re surviving a heat wave and a pandemic. You’ve earned it, and let’s face it, these are too good to share.

Sno Con Amor’s ice pops run $4 apiece and can be ordered for pickup or delivery by messaging @snoconamor on Instagram.