Good ideas can come from anywhere. Even 6-year-old girls. Mountain View resident Liz Snyder was enjoying a visit to the park with her daughter, Helen Liles. A popsicle vendor walked by, and Helen pleaded for a treat. Snyder said no because of the artificial and highly processed ingredients found in popsicles and ice cream. “I gave her a lecture for the umpteenth time,” she recalls. 

Snyder knows more about food than most. She helped start Full Circle Farm, an 11-acre urban farm in Sunnyvale. She worked as a development coordinator and educator at East Palo Alto’s urban farm, Collective Roots. She was a communications manager for Bon Appetit Management Co. (BAMCO), sustainable food provider to eBay, Cisco and Yahoo! And she worked for First 5 Santa Clara County, where she helped run start a produce program for low-income residents.

Blah, blah, blah, thought Snyder’s daughter. She just wanted a popsicle. Then she had an idea. “She said, ‘Mom, you just need to make your popsicles and bring them to the park so all the kids and the parents can have them.’” In a light-bulb moment, Snyder paused and thought, “Huh-you may be right.”

Snyder left her job at BAMCO so she could home school her daughter, who was struggling in public school. The decision was good for her daughter but made securing a steady income a challenge. Why not start a healthy popsicle company? So she did.

Thanks to Helen’s idea, Snyder created Little Bee Pops. (Helen’s nickname is “Little Bee.”) The popsicles will be made with local fruit and honey and healthy fats like olive oil and flax seed. Snyder plans to source as much fruit as she can from local urban farms, buying cosmetically challenged but otherwise delicious fruit that would otherwise end up in the compost.

“I started an urban farm and I know how difficult it is,” she explains. “The idea is we’re buying produce that can’t go to market, diverting food waste and creating a new income stream for small farmers.”

Flavors will change with the seasons, but the starting lineup includes strawberry-lemon-flax, cherry-lime-olive oil, raspberry-spinach-lemon-flax and the “green-eyed monster,” clementine-avocado-edamame.

Snyder is raising funds on Kickstarter.com and hopes to roll out her first popsicles this spring. She will sell her creations from a refrigerated pushcart in and around Mountain View. She’s raising funds to help pay for a blast freezer and a commercial kitchen space in San Jose. When we spoke last week, she had raised about $4,000 toward her $15,000 goal. Kickstarter, a crowd-sourced funding site, has an all-or-nothing policy. If Snyder falls just $10 short of her goal by Jan. 10 she doesn’t get the money. “I’m biting my nails at night,” she says.

Go to Littlebeepops.com and you’ll be directed to the Kickstarter site.