REAL FRESH ICE CREAM.
THE BEST OF COLORADO.
BY SHALEEN DESTEFANO
With out-of-the-box flavors, fresh ingredients you can pronounce, a sustainable business model and a firm belief in supporting local, what’s not to love about Sweet Action? To have them just around the corner on Old South Gaylord Street, feels like a lucky break for us Wash Parkers. We jumped at the opportunity to find out how this beloved brand came to be.
Let’s go all the way back. How did Sweet Action come to be?
Sweet Action is Denver’s first handcraft ice cream parlor that was started on Broadway in 2009. We’re an independently owned business operated by a crew that’s passionate about great food and community. Our mission is to provide quality products and genuine service with a personal touch. When our doors first opened, there was a lot of ice cream made with flavoring, coloring and fast, yet thoughtless, production processes. The word “homemade” was tossed around a lot, but what parlors usually meant by that was that they “home froze” ice cream, much in the way that one might homebake a boxed cake mix. While a third wave ice cream movement was underway in the big coastal cities, the wave hadn’t made it to Denver. Sweet Action started to change this.
Your flavors are inventive and delicious. I mean, nothing, NOTHING beats Stranahan’s Whiskey Brickle. How do you come up with your flavors?
We live in a world of infinite flavor possibilities! We can turn anything into an ice cream flavor. With our ice cream school knowledge (yes, we actually went to Penn State to learn ice cream) of formulating bases, we can work with any ingredient, balancing fats, sugars and water, to create an ice cream with good taste and texture. Inspiration for flavor ideas can strike in many different ways. Sometimes it’s playing with a memory of a past love. Ruby Road is basically a Rocky Road done up fancy (think Valrhona chocolate, ruby port, raspberry infused marshmallows, cacao nibs). Sometimes, it’s what we ate today that we’ve never seen in an ice cream format. Double dare. Mexican Street Corn (yep, with the Kewpie mayo, cotija cheese and a squeeze of lime). Sometimes, it’s identifying flavor notes in a single ingredient and riffing on it. Stranahan’s Whiskey Brickle. If you riff on the buttery caramel notes of the whiskey, it will take you to the brickle. Sometimes, it’s an amazing ingredient at the farmers market that’s just begging to be an ice cream. Palisade peaches. Need I say more? Sometimes, it’s about what you got. No fruits in the dead of the winter? Well, beets it is. Throw in some honey and cinnamon and you wouldn’t believe how good eating your veggies can be.
Speaking of Stranahans, you make it a point to work with local farmers, and distillers for your recipes. For the people in the back, why is this so important?
Supporting local farmers and distillers is so important for many reasons. We never lose sight of the Denver food community, of which we are a part. Our success as a business depends on the success of the Denver food community. One of the most direct ways that we can help the Denver food community thrive is for us to buy local ingredients. In addition to the economic benefits of sourcing locally, there are environmental and food quality benefits. Sourcing ingredients that grow well in Colorado and don’t have to travel to our plate reduces our carbon footprint. Further, if we don’t have to pay for our ingredients to travel, more of our budget can go towards buying quality. Finally, there is an unquantifiable magic to knowing our food. We love going to the farmers markets and talking to the people who grew our food. Conditions are always changing – the climate, varieties grown, growing methods. Knowing more about our ingredients allows us to better use them.
Sweet Action puts sustainability at the top, when it comes to priorities. Can you tell us more about this?
Sweet Action is dedicated to running a sustainable business. This means taking care of our environment and taking care of our team. We were one of Xcel Energy’s first Windsource commercial customers (literally the poster child) – our whole operation runs on wind-powered energy. We use compostable wares and we recycle. With regard to our team, we don’t believe it’s fair to pay the tipped minimum wage and have staff figure out the rest with whatever tips are made or not made, regardless of the weather, the time and day of the week, or the season. Our shops run tip free. We pay dependable living wages that are well above the tipped minimum wage and offer health insurance. We take pride in being thoughtful about not only what we do, but how we do it.
In a state with multiple ice cream shops, what sets you apart from the herd?
Sweet Action is handmade in Denver with the finest ingredients from our local purveyors. We source high quality dairy from a farm in Longmont for our ice cream base. We even have a dairy plant license and a pasteurizing tank so that we can make our own bases for some of our more unique flavors. We use fresh fruit and bake our own baked goods to mix into our ice cream. Because, you don’t have to fake it when you use the real deal!
With so many dietary restrictions at play, you’ve made it a mission to have inclusive options. How have your vegan options been received?
Our vegan options have been very well received and the interest for them continues to grow! There are so many people who are opting for “nice cream” for a host of reasons. Our greatest accomplishment with them is that we have dairy ice cream eaters eating them and not even realizing they went for the vegan option. Nearly all of the flavors we make in dairy format can be made in a non-dairy format, so we have many more vegan options to roll out.
What can we expect from Sweet Action in the future?
There are many things that we are looking forward to at Sweet Action Wash Park. One addition in the works is a line of baked goods. As mentioned, we bake all of our mix-in ingredients. This past year, we started offering brownies, cookies and the breads we make for our ice cream. They’ve been doing well, so we’d like to add more baked items this fall. We’d also like to start offering ice cream cakes and pies. We offer them for the holidays, but we’ve been getting requests for them year round. As far as our parlor goes, we’d like to build out a patio. We’ve been running with the impromptu set-up that we opened the parlor with, and it’s time for an upgrade.
When you’re not in the shop, who are some of your favorite local businesses to support?
Well, we have a habit of taking what we like to eat and turning it into ice cream. So, whether we’re at the shop or not, there’s a definite connection between local businesses we support and the ice cream we make. Some shout outs: Morton’s Organic Orchards (amazing stone fruit from the nicest family), Laz Ewe 2 Bar Goat Dairy, Savory Spice, Huckleberry Roasters, Rising Sun Distillery.
Thank you for putting so much care into your craft, Sweet Action crew. You’ve got big fans in the neighborhood, and we look forward to seeing how you’ve grown in the coming year. I mean, baked goods? Yes please. To learn more about this innovative team, visit sweetaction.com