Phil and Pamela Keuter, educators for the Warrenton-Hammond School District, run Sweet Scoops in the evenings at the North Coast Retail Center.

Pamela and Phil Keuter’s day starts at school between 7 and 7:30 a.m. She is a counselor at Warrenton High School. He is an eighth-grade English and language arts teacher at Warrenton Grade School.

By 4 p.m. the two are out of school and on their way to Sweet Scoops, the confectionery, gelato and frozen yogurt shop they opened this summer at the North Coast Retail Center.

“We were empty nesters,” Pamela Keuter said. “Our kids are grown and gone.”

The two opened Sweet Scoops in the new building constructed by Ben Doney of Ben’s Computer Store, wedged in between The Human Bean, Taco Bell and Sleep Train. The shop is stocked with 18 flavors of gelato and six blends of frozen yogurt. Lining the walls and walkways of Sweet Scoops is a wide collection of unique, bulk and retro candies and other stocking stuffers.

But the premier offering is gelato, the Italian-style ice cream. Phil Keuter, who takes heart medication, said he wanted to make something low-fat. The gelato he makes comes out at between 6 and 10 percent fat, using whole milk and a small amount of cream. The couple source their own ingredients to make the flavors, from pumpkin and nutmeg for a pumpkin spice latte to local fruits.

“We have a whole Italian branch of our family,” Phil Keuter said. “We’ve been to Italy, learned about gelato.”

He makes the gelato for Sweet Scoops, while his wife works the front counter.

Phil grew up in Eugene, and Pamela in Southern California. Both have been in the education field more than 20 years and met while working in southern Oregon. They had been living for nine years in Tucson, Arizona, when Warrenton Grade School Principal Tom Rogozinski recruited them to Warrenton.

Phil Keuter said the couple looked around and found the North Coast a mix of everything they wanted out of life, from parks and the beach to restaurants in Astoria and proximity to their three sons in the Portland and Salem metro areas.

Over their first couple of summers, the couple also noticed the frustration of driving to tourist hot spots like Seaside and Astoria.

“We just said we need something here,” Phil Keuter said of Warrenton, adding the customer base runs the gamut from kids to commercial fishermen.