Expedition #4 - School Grounds Coffee Company Cohort

Words & Photos from Garret W. & Jessica C.

We had an exciting and dynamic fourth Expedition Day in the School Grounds Coffee cohort. We were very lucky, and were invited to come to UVIC and work with processor Mia Maki and some of her grad students. We spent the majority of our day learning the key basics to run and start up a business that most people forget. We went to a computer lab to be taught how to use microsoft excel to create a very useful spreadsheet to calculate how much supply and inventory we would need to successfully run our business and never have too much or run out of stock. After we moved locations inside of UVIC to be taught about how to market our product and market it correctly to the right market. Such as how to advertise to the people we expect to buy our coffee. This was very interesting and we began planning our own marketing strategies for School Grounds Coffee.

After lunch we went to Discovery coffee downtown for the remainder of our day. Here we were taught the very key basics on our to serve and extract the coffee from the coffee beans. We went over on how you should keep the equipment clean as you work and the proper technique to operate the machines without wearing out the joints in your body over time. Excitingly, we will now be able to operate the espresso machine in the Howard cafe at SMUS and serve coffee customers.

We are all looking forward to putting all the skills we are acquiring into practice as we aim to launch the School Grounds Coffee company here on campus.







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