In the moments before the lunch period at Centralia High School on Thursday, just a few students and staff from Lewis County Coffee Co. buzzed around behind the counter of the school's new student-run store preparing for a rush of students looking to buy a snack or beverage.
Students, staff and Lewis County Coffee Co. celebrated the opening of the Tiger Hut in the Centralia High School cafeteria Thursday morning.
The snack stand, which has been in the works for roughly three years since the completion of the high school's remodel, helped its first customers during the lunch period, which started just after 11 a.m.
The student-run store offers drinks and snacks and accepts virtually any kind of payment, from cash to card to Apple Pay. It’s staffed by Centralia High School marketing class students in partnership with Lewis County Coffee Co., which has volunteered staff to help train the students in the first weeks of the store’s opening.
The high school's marketing course instructor, Lisa Mack, hustled in and around the stand ahead of the lunch period, checking in with students and solving problems in preparation for the shop's opening moments.
Mack acts as a sort of manager for the stand as the students staff it. She also works with them in the classroom, teaching them other sides of the business, such as marketing, sales and advertising.
Mack said the goal, both in the classroom and behind the counter, is to give the students employable skills for after high school.
“They have their food worker cards, and so our goal is to try to gain students employability skills and to be able to prepare them for the working world, tying into marketing,” Mack said. “So we’re doing promotion and sales and inventory. They’re learning cash handling and tying in with Lewis County Coffee. Now, they are learning barista skills, working as a team, collaborating and all of those things.”
Mack not only teaches the class and oversees the students. She was also responsible for pitching the idea of a partnership to Lewis County Coffee Co. The opening of the Tiger Hut has been a long time coming, according to Mack and Lewis County Coffee Co. co-founder Samantha Magnuson.
Mack first approached the local coffee chain roughly three years ago as the Centralia High School remodel finished up. Unfortunately, the snack shack built during that remodel wasn't up to the right standards set by the city and health department. So further remodels have led to delays in opening the student-run store at Centralia High School. W.F. West High School in Chehalis instead beat them to the punch, opening their own student-run store more than two years ago.
“This was going to be our first ‘partnered with, powered by’ store in a school, and then, with lots of construction struggles, Chehalis beat her because they were able to start from the ground up,” Magnuson said. “Hopefully, more schools in Lewis County are next.”
As the shop just begins its operations, it will start by serving a limited menu as Mack and her students work out the kinks. The phase one menu offers cold drinks such as cold brew coffee, smoothies, energizers and Italian soda, and snacks, including low calorie chips and Rice Krispies treats.
Mack said they hope to move into the phase two menu by winter, which means bringing in espresso machines and training the students on making hot drinks.
The stand, however, comes with some extra challenges when compared with a standard coffee stand. The shop has to comply with nutritional standards that control what can be served in a public school.
All of the drinks and products sold match what you would get at a Lewis County Coffee Co. stand. Lewis County Coffee trains the students, but the partnership also means the stand purchases its products through the Lewis County Coffee Co. distribution company and uses the same products as one of the local drive-through coffeestands.
“They're using all the same products we offer at the stands,” Magnuson said. “They purchase their products through our distribution company or our roasting company, but we’re not taking any of the proceeds from the process. The money goes back into the club so the kids can pay for their events to go to competitions, etc.”
According to Centralia High School Career and Technical Education (CTE) Director Carissa Folgner, the money from the stand will first and foremost go to funding any essentials for the stand and secondly to fund the school’s Future Business Leaders of America chapter. Profits will help fund events and travel for the student organization and its members. The student-run store at W.F. West High School has a similar arrangement.
While not all students who enroll in the marketing class or work at the stand are members of the club, the marketing course and stand serves as a kind of pipeline into the club with all students that take a course with Mack being eligible to enroll in the student organization that offers leadership experience to high school students outside the classroom.
Magnuson added that in the long term Lewis County Coffee Co. hopes the arrangement could turn into a sort of scholarship program and pipeline for employment.
“Ultimately, the goal is a big scholarship,” Magnuson said. “There would be some sort of scholarship in the end that multiple local businesses could partner together and say ‘we’ll all be your unpaid board of directors to help you get where you need to go.’ Now, we don't have that figured out yet, but that's the goal long term.”
