New Coffee Shop at Hillwood

Do you ever need that shot of caffeine after staying up until 1 am doing school work? Chef Rummage and his culinary students have recently opened a coffee shop to sell drinks and pastries to faculty, and possibly students, in the future.

“I want the coffee shop to teach the students how to work together in a business environment and to understand the responsibility and teamwork that it takes to run a food business,” Chef Rummage said.

The items available for sale range from hand-crafted coffee drinks, like mochas lattes, to pastries such as sandwiches, scones, and biscuits.

“The coffee shop helps with many skills like time management and getting orders out at an appropriate time. It also allows us (culinary students) to work together and collaborate on recipes and try new things. When we started we had a lot of trial and error with the drinks we were trying to make and we finally got a menu. We also see the marketing side of things with the presentation of the coffee and pastries and getting the word out,” senior Reese Gatewood said.

Students are very excited to participate and experience and work in a business environment and getting hands on experience with making coffee

“The coffee shop menu will be changing based on sales. If one item sells more and some others don’t sell at all, we would make more of what’s selling and cut out what doesn’t sell to prevent wasting food and saving money,” Chef Rummage said.

Teachers can purchase food by prepaying through a digital punch card. Students can’t purchase coffee yet due to the large amount of students and orders that would come in at one time. Students may be able to place orders in the future.

“While we make much profit we use most of it to replenish materials and ingredients,” Chef Rummage said.

The money earned through the coffee shop will be used to replenish ingredients so the students can continue to prepare for more customers.

“If we get request and see that certain items are selling then we will adjust our menu accordingly,” Chef Rummage said.

As of now the things available to purchase are lattes such as black and iced coffees which are (for now) only available to teachers, but pastries like the lemon cranberry and cinnamon toast scones are available to both students and teachers as well as a multitude of breakfast sandwiches.