In Denver’s pre-2020 days, we had two main ways to get ice cream. We either went to a scoop shop for a cone, or we bought a pint, quart or gallon in the grocery store’s frozen aisle. Simple. Civilized. Predictable. Not typically involving Instagram nor the trunk of another person’s car.

Then the pandemic hit and melted our tidy little ice cream system to a puddle on the ground.

The year 2020 will go down for a lot of things, but let’s add two more to the list. First, it became a golden year for entrepreneurship, and second, it might be the year we ate more ice cream straight from the carton than at any point in human history. Combine those two trends with a wave of young, ice cream-curious Denverites suddenly laid off from their jobs, and we had an ice cream renaissance, a frozen dairy uprising, a pint-sized revolution! Or at the very least, we had much, much better ice cream.  

And the pandemic didn’t just change where we got our frozen treats — from scoop shops to strangers’ trunks in random parking lots — it transformed what we expected from it, these underground operations often superior to what we settled for before. Oh, and the bad news. Like everything else post-pandemic, we pay more for it, with many of these hand-crafted pints going for $12 or more.

But what is $12 when it comes to a freezer full of emotional insurance? Someone had to start our quarantine-era, small-batch ice cream boom, and in Denver it was David Right and Caitlin Howington, owners of Right Cream and Pint’s Peak Ice Cream, respectively.

Right was a tech salesman with a serious interest in ice cream who found himself with a lot of time on his hands in the spring of 2020. So he started experimenting, selling 20 to 30 pints at a time via an Instagram page and delivering straight to people’s houses. On nights, weekends and in between Zoom meetings, he’d make the Oreo toffee, gooey butter cake and almost too salty caramel that packed his pints.

Word spread quickly, as it tends to do when frozen desserts are involved. Soon came the now-infamous trunk pickups in the Westminster H Mart parking lot, a model that felt a little like a secret club: watch Instagram, reserve your pint, show up at the appointed time and find the guy slinging ice cream out of his trunk. Weird, yes. But when you’re making the best pints in town, life finds a way.

Right Cream soon outgrew his trunk, expanding into alley and pick-up windows downtown before settling into a tiny shop at Denver Beer Co.’s Rosedale outpost, where fans line up for flavors that often blur the line between pastry case and freezer.

Former pastry chef Howington started Pint’s Peak around the same time, after being laid off from her catering job. Rather than waiting around for the world to open up again, she decided to build the dessert business she’d been imagining — small-batch pints in inventive flavors like lemon meringue pie and ube cookies & cream. Like Right Cream, she started with home delivery, testing the waters one pint at a time.

Then she graduated to the park. That summer, she sold her pints out of a cooler at Cheesman Park, followed by a cart at farmers’ markets and eventually a full-on Pint’s Peak truck. Howington calls her mobile and pick-up model an “advantage,” letting her move where the events — and the people — are.

Another ice cream maker found his pandemic pivot on four wheels. Chuck James had already started Polar Bros., his side hustle liquid nitrogen ice cream truck, while working as a bartender when COVID hit. When the bars shut down in spring 2020, he shifted fully to the truck, driving to HOA-sponsored meetups around the metro area to serve masked neighbors looking for a treat.

“We crushed it,” he said. “Worked every day for like three years.”

Today Polar Bros. focuses on festivals, weddings and catering, while also selling through hotels and local markets like Leevers Locavore.

That preorder-and-pickup system that popped up during the pandemic didn’t disappear when the world reopened. In fact, for many small-batch ice cream makers, it turned out to be the perfect business model. Michael Kimball uses it for his Sadboy Creamery, which sells fancy pints with punny names like Cosmic Frownie Batter and Teary-misu.

Kimball counts Right Cream among the local businesses whose models inspired him. Since launching Sadboy in early 2023, he’s leaned into weekly flavor drops, each one a mini event. On Monday mornings, he posts a handful of creative flavors, and customers race to claim them for pickup later in the week before they’re gone.

The system works because it keeps things small and focused.

“You can control your inventory a lot better,” Right said. “You can focus on doing a couple of unique flavors, executing an idea you’ve had. That’s the cool thing about doing the drops: you can hype up that exclusivity.”

Kimball said the approach fits his philosophy.

“I have always prioritized quality, flavor and texture over speed and quantity, so a small-batch/drop model made a ton of sense for me,” he said.

So are shops just gone? Not even close, but opening a brick-and-mortar in today’s real estate market is expensive. It’s way easier to start with a trunk pickup, DIY home delivery, market stand or even a truck than to lease a full-on ice creamery. The smaller scale model lets makers experiment, keep costs low and stay nimble.

And maybe that’s part of why we’re still eating so much ice cream. We want inventive, interesting desserts that feel like a little rebellion against the ordinary, and we’re willing to drive to random parking lots to get them. As Right put it: “Why not treat ourselves nowadays?”

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