Cruising down Route 309 in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, it’s hard to miss The Inside Scoop. Just look for the burly, lantern-jawed, 20-foot man holding an ice cream scoop in one hand and a chocolate cone in the other. “Chip,” a fiberglass replica of the iconic Route 66 “muffler man” statues of the ’50s and ’60s, is a beacon for Lehigh Valley ice cream lovers young and old, welcoming them to the retro-style shop owned by Tony Caciolo ’89 ’93G ’23P and his wife, Penny ’23P.
A place to take the kids
The year was 2008. Tony, a custom home and pool contractor, and Penny, a corporate CPA, were watching their young son’s youth football team suffer an epic defeat on a field that, coincidentally, was adjacent to the building that became their shop.
“I said to Penny, ‘It’d be nice if we could take the kids for ice cream somewhere,’” Tony reminisces. “Growing up playing Little League baseball, at the end of a game — either a big win or a big loss — one of the dads would say, ‘Hey, we’re going to the drive-in — ice cream’s on me.’ And there was nowhere to go in Coopersburg. I told Penny, ‘We should open up an ice cream shop.’ She said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got time for that!’” he laughs.
But around six months later, they’d leased and renovated that somewhat dilapidated building by the sports fields, stripping out everything but the exterior walls and vintage wood interior and adding fun retro soda shop décor. The Inside Scoop was open for business.
Now Penny is the full-time manager of a staff of around 50 teenaged employees, mentoring them not just on how to serve customers, but how to be good employees in what for many is their first job. After designing the building, Tony is now on call to fix things when needed. The Caciolos’ son, Dominic ’25, a supply chain major at Lehigh, even did a stint as an ice cream maker for a time.
The Lehigh Valley’s favorite ice cream
The Inside Scoop appears frequently on lists of the Lehigh’s Valley’s favorite ice cream. Tony believes it’s because they made a choice to ensure the flavors in their product are super intense.
“If a recipe says you should use one quart of black raspberry for five gallons of ice cream, we increase that by 50%. And we use real ingredients. Our cookies and cream has gigantic pieces of real Oreos we break up ourselves,” he says.
The shop is also known for its unique and creative flavors like mocha chip (its signature flavor, made with real coffee and Belgian chocolate), maple bacon (featuring chunks of brown sugar-candied bacon), and oatmeal brown sugar (“tastes just like an oatmeal cookie!”). The Caciolos also make something called an Atomic Freeze, in which their 14% butterfat ice cream is churned into soft-serve with an auger, accompanied by any mix-in ingredients the customer would like.
True ice cream lovers, the lactose-tolerant, and large groups can attempt the Volcano, a sundae consisting of 14 scoops of ice cream and eight toppings, served with six spoons in a huge ceramic bowl with a smoking dry-ice volcano in the center. Finish it and your party can have its photo mounted on the “Wall of Flame.”
“I still use what I learned in my accounting classes, but, most important, I gained leadership skills at Lehigh. The overall experience was phenomenal for me.”
A dedicated Lehigh alum
Tony says that growing up in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, he was convinced there was nothing better than going to college at Lehigh. That proved true because, he says, “it was the best four years of my life.” He and Penny married in Packer Chapel, and after working in Ohio for a while, the accounting major came back for his MBA. In addition to co-owning Monogram Custom Homes and Pools, Tony is director of the Lehigh University Alumni Association (LUAA) board. The Caciolos are well known for throwing excellent Class of ’89 Reunion parties.
“I still use what I learned in my accounting classes, but, most important, I gained leadership skills at Lehigh. The overall experience was phenomenal for me.”
