Plenty of people have cool business ideas, but Jim Picariello’s was downright cold. Some would even call it frosty.

Picariello calls it Frostea.

And the people who love these frozen tea pops simply call the idea delicious.

“People are really tearing into it,” said Chuck Lawrence, who sells Frosteas at his Tradewinds Marketplace in Blue Hill. “I just had to rearrange the display, and I collected four empty cases just this morning. … We had a ton of requests for it.”

To create Frosteas and their sister product, the tea-free Frostbites, Picariello uses organic teas, along with locally produced honey and maple syrup. Lawrence says demand is always high for local, organic products, and the fact that they’re a more sophisticated, grown-up riff on candy-colored Pop-Ice doesn’t hurt, either.

Since Picariello and his business partner, Joanne Steenberg, introduced the product line in 2006, it has been picked up by Whole Foods stores in Maine and Massachusetts as well as local grocers and natural food stores.

On a recent morning, Picariello and Steenberg sat under a shade tree at Blue Hill Consolidated School, where they manufacture the pops. They had spread out a variety of frozen treats on a table before them and nibbled away as they recounted the story of how their company, Wise Acre, came to be.

“We do this all the time – we’ll still taste them and be like, ‘God, this is so good,'” Picariello said.

It has been that way since the beginning. In 2001, Picariello and his wife, Jill Day, spent the year on Cliff Island in Casco Bay. His drink of choice was jasmine tea sweetened with honey, and invariably, there would be leftovers. One sweltering summer day, he took what was left in the teapot and froze it into ice pops.

“When I made it, it was hard as a rock, but it still tasted good,” said Picariello, who now lives in Brooksville. He liked it so much, he made the frozen treat again and again. “Two years ago, I literally woke up at 1 a.m. going, ‘Does anybody make these?'”

After exhaustive research, he determined that nobody did. So Picariello got to work, starting with a visit to the Washington-Hancock Community Agency. He had a background in natural food retailing, having worked the produce section at Bread and Circus, a chain that eventually was bought out by Whole Foods. For two years, he and Day managed the Blue Hill Co-op. But he had no idea how to start a food manufacturing business.

WHCA pointed him in the direction of the Maine Technology Institute, and soon he had received three seed grants to develop his product.

“That sort of thing started a little bit of a buzz,” said Steenberg, of Penobscot. “People started talking, saying, ‘Hey, did you hear this guy got a grant?'”

In the early days, Picariello set up a booth at the Blue Hill farmers market to test his products and survey passers-by on texture and taste. He started with 10 flavors and now sells five: jasmine green tea, the South American yerba mate tea, caffeine-free herbal tea, honey and maple-lemon.

At the time, Steenberg hadn’t heard the buzz about Frosteas, but when her children saw Picariello’s pops, they started a buzz of their own. First, they asked their mom if they could have one. A few minutes later, they asked if they could have another.

“I’m nutritionally strict with sweets and desserts, and I’m always looking for desserts that aren’t loaded with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup,” Steenberg explained. “It was sort of this moment between me and the kids that we found something we loved.”

She was hooked. She also was one of Picariello’s best customers, so they began talking about a partnership. Steenberg has a background in education, sales and entrepreneurship – she started her own sailboat company and later worked as a marketing and public relations consultant in New York. When she and her family moved to Maine, she spent three years as the development director for the Bay School.

“What is clear for me is that all the varied pieces of my career life fit together like a puzzle for my new adventure with Wise Acre,” Steenberg said.

She was drawn to Picariello not only for the product, but for his keen entrepreneurial sense. He has, as he says, done everything by the book. He started by conducting a market analysis, drafted a business plan that has drawn praise from local and national financial advisers, and assembled a board that reads like a “Who’s Who” of the natural foods industry. Among Wise Acre’s advisers are Nasoya co-founder John Paino, O’Naturals president Mac McCabe and Picariello’s uncle Joe, who was in charge of sales for Dove Bars.

Because the product is made with all natural ingredients, Picariello worked with food scientists from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension to fine-tune the texture and shelf life of the pops.

“The more I learn about my product, the more I understand why food scientists at larger companies use sugar and chemicals,” Picariello said. “It helps with the consistency.”

Picariello and Steenberg are in the process of courting investors so they can grow the business. Their plans include a local, standalone production facility as well as new packaging machinery that will boost production from 1,800 pops a day to “a zillion.” A more streamlined distribution plan is in the works, as the product must be shipped and sold frozen.

Given the nature of their ingredients – the flavor and makeup of honey and maple vary from season to season – Wise Acre won’t lose its “boutique” cachet, even if they start churning out freeze pops by the zillion.

“We are constantly tasting and retasting,” Picariello said. “It’s always sort of a microbrew, but we try to keep it the same level of yumminess.”

For more information, visit www.wise-acre.com.