What do a horse trailer and a three-wheeled freezer chest have in common? Both deliver small-batch ice cream that’s made in the mountains. 

Kayla Feld and Oliver Bacharach launched Afternoon Deelites during the pandemic, selling home-churned scoops (with optional booze pour-overs) at galleries, pop-ups, and private events from a classic bicycle-based ice cream cart they bought at an online thrift store. Since then, Meat & Cheese, Mi Chola, and Hooch have commissioned flavors (red bean; dulce de leche and Oaxacan chocolate; Amaro Montenegro) for their dessert menus. Based at the Aspen Saturday Market last summer, Afternoon Deelites cultivated a following as a farm-to-cone favorite. 

“Our summer flavors are dictated by our neighbors at the farmer’s market,” explains Bacharach, who named the company after his famous father’s thoroughbred racehorse, a six-time graded-stakes winner who sired the star, Seabiscuit. “[Parked] next to [Palisade-based organic fruit grower] Rancho Durazno, we would bring home boxes of peaches, apricots, cherries, nectarines [for] a new flavor or sorbet every week.” 

Meanwhile, when Brinkley Moon Nelson turned 5 in 2020, family friends gifted her a pedal-powered freezer that became a vehicle for a pandemic homeschool lesson in enterprise—an ice cream company dubbed Brinkle’s Sprinkles. 
“[My husband] Austin and I both run businesses, and we wanted to teach Brinkley the same spirit of entrepreneurship,” says Tara Nelson, who grew up in a family of New Jersey restaurateurs and uses her mother’s recipe as a base for 29 flavors of ice cream and sorbet and 15 popsicles, most available dairy-free. While her parents might be the brains and brawn of the business, Brinkley has embraced her role as brand ambassador; this summer Aspen Ideas Festival even requested that the 7-year-old serve as scooper for a day.
“She really does enjoy being the face of it, she likes being center stage,” Nelson says, adding that in addition to leveraging local celebrity, her daughter has learned how to set up an LLC and file taxes. “The impetus was really lighting the fire: She gets to be a boss babe too.”

At The Dreamery, Meghan Thomas harbors similar boss-babe ambitions for her 7-year-old daughter, Olivia. “I want to be an inspiration for my daughter—you can have an idea, start your own business, and make it happen,” says the veteran event planner and food and beverage professional. 

In its second summer, The Dreamery, quartered in a peachsicle-hued converted horse trailer (outfitted with freezers, sink, marble counter, and silver tin ceiling by fiancé, Jesse Tanner, and Basalt-based craftsman John Watkins), will supply ice cream sandwiches to The Stew Pot and New Belgium Ranger Station in Snowmass Village. In addition to private events, the trailer will be parked at public gatherings including Heritage Fire and Thursday concerts in Snowmass.

Along with soft-serve and a half-dozen varieties of “sandos” (such as salted caramel rolled in Almond Roca and pistachio coated in chocolate “dirt”), Thomas is selling a freewheeling vibe she describes as “happy, bright, and filled with sprinkles.”

The very essence of summer in Aspen. 

Afternoon Deelites
afternoon-deelites.business.site

Brinkle’s Sprinkles
brinklesprinkles.com 

The Dreamery
thedreameryco.com