Run on the Big Wheel, a Snow Cone Vendor Like No Other

By 2020, 42-year-old Katrin Iken had spent two decades working a desk job, most recently in operations at a container manufacturing company. When the pandemic shut schools down, her family decided to temporarily relocate from Boulder to North Carolina and focus on home-schooling their two middle-school children.

During physics lessons, Iken was looking for fun YouTube videos to explain simple machines to her kids when she ran across Be the Hamster, a Rube Goldberg machine constructed by hobbyist tinkerer Joe Donoughe. The human-powered apparatus produced snow cones and frozen beverages, and it was mesmerizing, Iken recalls.

Participants spun handles, worked conveyor belts and used levers and pulley systems to move and fill a cup of ice, then climbed into a seven-foot tall wheel and ran five to seven rotations to crush the ice before flavoring it with various syrups.

Iken and her kids loved it, and she reached out to Donoughe to tell him so, to which he replied, “'You know, if you want it, I’ll sell it to you,'" Iken says. “It was a strange turn of my life. My husband’s like, ‘I’m sorry, what? You’re going to be a snow cone vendor now?’ ‘Yes I am, honey. Yes I am.'"

So she paid Donoughe $10,000, and he drove the contraption, which she rebranded as Big Wheel Beverages, from Florida to Boulder. They set up shop at the Boulder Creek Festival together, where Donoughe taught Iken all the tricks of the trade. From the very start, it was a hit.

“It was crowded the entire time; the lines were nonstop for three days. I had just a great time, and I immediately was already getting booked,” Iken remembers. “Every time I bring [the Big Wheel] anywhere, I always get at least one request for another event.”

The Big Wheel stands out among festival vendors — for $5, you not only get a snow cone, but also an experiential science experiment that entertains. It incorporates most of the simple machines (screw, lever, pulley, wheel, axle, etc.) and introduces children to Rube Goldberg contraptions. “I explain who Rube Goldberg is, and some kids are really into the mechanics of it, and they’ll walk around the whole thing and try to figure out how it works,” Iken says.

Many kids will tell her, “‘I’m going to go home and make this.’ And I’m like, 'That would be amazing. Go for it, kid!'” Big Wheel is often a staple at children’s STEM events, such as STEM Day at the Colorado Rockies, and Iken has a close relationship with Jeff & Paige, the nature- and science-focused children’s musicians, often appearing at their events.

It’s educational, but more important, it’s just great fun. Iken has fallen in love with her new lifestyle, roaming from festival to festival, pulling her Big Wheel on her trailer behind her truck and setting up to entertain kids. “I just smile for hours watching these little kids come through. And now that I’ve been doing it for a few years, I have this little following where I’m watching them grow up,” Iken says. “A preschooler, a three-, four-, five-year old, explaining it to them can take a couple of minutes. That can slow things down. But really, they’re the cutest. But then you get these middle-schoolers on it and they can do it in like 25 seconds because they all want to go as fast as they can. They get their watches out and their phones, and they see who can go the fastest, and they race through it.”

During the warm months of the year, Iken is fully booked out, traveling all over Colorado for events like the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Fruita and the Lafayette Peach Festival. She also has a hometown favorite, the Pearl Street Tulip Fairy & Elf Festival. Her next public Denver event will be at Q BBQ Fest at Empower Field on May 27 and 28.

The business has become a family affair — Iken's kids, now in eighth and ninth grades, will often travel with her. “They help me work, they make some money, and then they go run away with all the other kids that they’ve met that they now see at all these events and get to know,” Iken says. “They just have such a good time. It’s so fun. [They have] unlimited access to all these activities, and these festivals always have live music and food trucks, and a lot of them have rides, and so they spend a lot of weekends in the summer just going around to these different towns and making friends.”

The Big Wheel isn’t just for kids, though. Many adults have found it just as fun. In March, Iken was at ETHDenver, a cryptocurrency conference at the National Western Complex, where she says her frozen beverages were quite the hit.

Big Wheel doesn’t have a liquor license, so it cannot sell alcoholic drinks at festivals and public events, but the machine is flexible to set up for frozen margaritas and other frozen alcoholic beverages for private parties or flat-fee events.

For now, it’s just Iken working the events with part-time help from family and friends, but because of high demand, she’s thinking about starting to look for a partner that could operate a second Big Wheel — ideally someone Spanish-speaking so she can start to serve the Hispanic community, she notes.

Additionally, with snow cones only being viable from April to October, she’s been mulling over ideas with Donoughe about adapting the Big Wheel for hot chocolate or other warm drinks for winter. For now, though, she’s enjoying the ride and the chance to be outdoors entertaining kids while sneaking in some science lessons and knowing her desk job days are long behind her.