Faith Miller
Managing Editor
Starting this October, students will be able to get their coffee fix at Becker’s Brew, FSC’s newest coffee cart.
In the walls of the Barney Barnett School of Business and Free Enterprise lies The Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (CFEE), which seeks to prepare students in new ways before heading off into the professional world.
The cart plans to be open from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and will be located between the Becker Business Building and the Weinstein Computer Services Center. Currently, staff plans to do an opening launch right before fall break, and then a grand opening combined with an event afterwards.
Through a deal with Guest Services, students will be allowed to use Moc Bucks and other forms of non-FSC payment methods to make purchases.
Justin Heacock, the Director of the CFEE, got the idea for the new coffee cart while at a conference in Las Vegas, Nev. last October. He learned about experiential learning labs that are designed to help students apply what they are learning in class. The idea is similar to science labs, but with a business aspect as well.
“So the great thing is what some of the better entrepreneurship programs in the country do is they’ll create learning labs where they say, all right, let’s create a business with that same principle of students to experiment and test and iterate with what they learn in class,” Heacock said.
Following this conference, Heacock and several other members of the school began exploring possible options to implement on campus. The original idea was a coffee shop, would have resulted in $300,000 in capital expenditures along with having to find the space for it on campus.
The school eventually settled on a coffee cart. A total of 48 students applied across 13 different majors, enough to staff seven coffee carts.
“So we ended up actually settling on a coffee cart, which is a great thing because one, you can do it for about 20 to 30 grand,” Heacock said. “Two: it can be very fluid and changing.”
The cart was proposed in January and got approved in April. Construction began the same month. They are now in the stages of spreading the word across campus and have begun forming their official team that will work at the cart.
A lot of the cart revolves around strategic decision making, where students will be placed in the mindset of a real entrepreneur and decide what to do with the business, an example being where the profit will go. Options for funding include reinventing, building more carts or upgrading machines.
“The idea is we’ll basically pay students 12 bucks an hour and they work in the cart, but all the students that we hire are these owner-operator collective teams,” Heacock said. “They’re going to be the ones that decide how much profit is left over each semester or year and say, all right, what do we do with this? And that’s a unique position because it puts you in the mindset of an entrepreneur, where that money is not going back to the school.”
The student taking charge of the project is Chloe Hacker, a junior business administration major with a long history of working in coffee. She will be training the team members and helping make sure the cart has everything it needs to run smoothly.
Through the cart, Hacker has been able to try out new recipes and make decisions on what the cart will offer. Her long term goal is to eventually open her own coffee shop, and this is giving her the real world experience to do so. When crafting her recipes, she has to keep in mind what students will enjoy and how she can offer that in a new way.
“I know from my experience that a lot of other people prefer sweeter coffee,” Hacker said. “They don’t really know what they’re getting in their ice coffee or their cold brew, they just know that they want caramel or vanilla in there… with the recipes, I’ve been keeping that in mind.”
Heacock said that depending on how well the Becker’s Brew cart performs, that the CFEE would like to venture into more student-led food projects in the future, which would double in giving students real experience inside the business world and allowing them to be a part of a rare opportunity, as well as providing more food options for the rest of campus life.
