“I love ice cream, I’ve always loved ice cream — it’s the world’s most beloved food,” proclaimed Pete Castleberry, owner of Arvada’s newest ice cream shop, Power Cone.
Castleberry is something of an expert on the subject. While attending CU Boulder, he got a job working at Ben and Jerry’s — one he calls “the best job ever before this one” — and began dreaming of one day opening up his very own ice cream shop.
Noticing a death of soft serve options in the local area, Castleberry said he saw an opportunity to follow his dreams and carve out his own niche in the local market.
“I realized that there’s not a lot of soft serve options in the Denver Metro area,” Castleberry said. “You’re pretty much limited to chains. And I love soft serve ice cream. I love it anywhere I go… I wanted to provide a super high quality, ethically sourced soft serve ice cream, and do something and do something unique.”
With its locally sourced, homemade soft serve mix, Castleberry said Power Cone is already breaking from industry norms to do something special.
Power Cone began as a family-run food truck in January 2023 and moved into a storefront on 8295 Ralston Road — just over from City Hall, across from Wolff Park — in mid-January of this year.
While the shop will operate with its winter hours for the time being, a grand opening is tentatively scheduled for the beginning of May, around when the store will go to expanded hours for the summer. For now, Power Cone is open from 1 to 9 p.m. from Tuesday to Sunday.
The shop specializes in three classic flavors — vanilla, chocolate and strawberry — along with a healthy dose of toppings including sprinkles, chocolate cream sandwiches (not Oreos, but not far off), crushed peanuts, hot fudge and caramel. For the more adventurous crowd, cones can be topped with ghost pepper salt or crushed up potato chips for an out-of-the box-flavor.
Castleberry said the spirit of soft serve is using toppings to create a wide variety of flavor profiles, rather than having a slew of flavors on tap. Soft serve spots are also limited by the number of machines they have — only one flavor can be made from a machine.
“The fun thing about soft serve is that you can make a soft serve cone and you can make it into a bunch of different things by rolling it in different toppings,” Castleberry said. “You can take a vanilla soft serve cone and roll it and crushed up chocolate cream cookies for kind of a cookies and cream experience… You can really do a lot with the toppings and making sundaes to create some different flavors and create some variety there.
“We will never be a shop that has 1,000 flavors,” Castleberry continued. “You know, my goal has always been to try to keep it simple but do what we do really well.”
For now, the Power Cone team is still family centric — Castleberry’s two young daughters help out in the shop when they’re not in school, and his wife has been a longtime contributor to the business — but is slowly expanding their team.
Castleberry said the move into a shop has been an adjustment, but one that’s very welcome for the Arvada resident, who added that it was important to him to open up the brick-and-mortar location in town.
“I’ve learned a lot during that time frame, and people seem to really enjoy the ice cream that I had been making,” Castleberry said of the time spent in the truck before moving into the storefront. “That gave me the opportunity to really fine tune my recipe and my ingredients and think about how to operationalize everything.
“And ultimately, I wanted a home base for my truck to operate out of, but also a place where people could come, even during the cold months,” Castleberry continued. “I live in Arvada, and I wanted to have a community place in Arvada that serves up some most excellent soft serve.”
The truck will still be operating for special events, starting up again in February.