FIVE THOUSAND pounds of ice: as heavy as a young elephant, or five wading pools filled to the brim. Dylan Williams, the owner of Beaucoup Nola Juice in New Orleans, hauled it all in a refrigerated truck from New Orleans to Manchester, Tenn., last week, to supply his snow cone stand at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. He also had a pile of watermelons, jugs of mango and pineapple juice, and two SnoWizards, stainless-steel contraptions that produce the silky, fluffy ice shavings required for a true Louisiana “snoball.” A snoball is to a snow cone as Warren Beatty is to Shirley MacLaine: closely related, but prettier, smoother and infinitely cooler. “In New Orleans, you can get killed if you call it a snow cone,” Mr. Williams said.

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Mr. Williams, who decorated his stand at Bonnaroo with Mardi Gras beads, uses lightly sweetened fresh juices and eschews colorings on his snowballs, both radical breaks with New Orleans tradition. Like other local treats such as the po’ boy, the New Orleans snoball has qualities unique to that city. Mysterious flavors like “nectar,” “orchid” and “ice cream” predominate, and each flavor can be made in a cream version, so it is possible to order, say, a “cream of ice cream” snowball at institutions like Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, where the same ice-shaving machine has been in use since the 1930s, or at Plum Street Snoball, where the owners make their own condensed milk for drizzling on top.

“There’s always going to be a kid who gives his mom a hard time because I don’t have purple,” Mr. Williams said. “But people who care how things taste seem to like mine better.”

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