SnoBall Effect: Started in Garner nearly 20 years ago by lovers of a favorite New Orleans treat, Pelican's SnoBalls is growing rapidly by keeping it chill.

• Author: Wanbaugh, Taylor

Asking Pelican's SnoBalls co-CEOs Gregg Fatool and Randall Wright about the difference between a snowball and a snow cone leads to a hearty round of laughter. "That IS the difference," Fatool says. "One's a snow cone, one's a snowball."

Not to be mistaken with the icy, crunchy rainbow snow cones often served in paper cones--which always seem to be dripping with a pool of sticky syrup at the bottom--traditional snowballs hail from New Orleans. The best way to think of it, Fatool adds, is as the consistency of an actual ball of fluffy snow with syrup distributed evenly throughout.

Snowballs made their first appearance in The Big Easy in the 1930s when natives George Ortolano and Ernest Hansen used the first iceshaving machines to create the frozen concoctions. They can now be found in just about every neighborhood in the city.

The Pelican's SnoBalls empire stems from the dreams of Ansley Johnson, then a Garner teenager who enjoyed the mouthwatering snowballs while visiting her grandparents in New Orleans. The problem was that she only got to enjoy the frozen treat in Louisiana, far from her family's home.

So she persuaded her dad, Adrian, a kitchen-cabinet builder, to open the first Pelican's SnoBalls nearly 20 years ago in the Wake County town just south of Raleigh. The pelican, which is the state bird of Louisiana, was a natural choice for the name of the tiny brightly colored snowball stand.

Pelican's changed ownership in late 2017 when Fatool and Wright took over as co-CEOs after owning seven total Pelican's locations of their own for several years. They moved the headquarters to downtown Gastonia.

Fatool first met Adrian Johnson at Pelican's original Garner location, where he would often stop for a snowball after hitting the local driving range. He had some food-industry experience having driven a tractor-trailer for Domino's Pizza Inc. for 15 years.

"There was always a line," Fatool says. "I thought, This is crazy!' I kept thinking, 'Man, I wish I could get into that.'"

He purchased his first Pelican's store near UNC Charlotte in 2012. It was tiring work, but Fatool says it was "the good kind of tired." He took "an old, piece-of-crap building and turned it into something that everybody loved.... And Adrian always said, 'Love your customer."'

Wright previously worked as an operations manager at a manufacturing facility for 15 years and as a pastor before he bought into the business in 2014. He and his family used to frequent Fatool's...