The Bulldog Cafe
Third Floor Lyndhurst Campus
Bergen Community College
1280 Wall Street
Lyndhurst, NJ 07071
Monday-Thursday 7:30am-2:30pm/Friday 7:30am-1:30pm
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Every semester I like to challenge my students to top what the other group has done in full team projects and it is a chance for the students to get to know one another better. In a commuter college like ours it is very difficult as students go to class and then go home or to work right after it is over.
This semester I challenged my two hundred level Marketing students to market the Lyndhurst campus Snack Shop on the third floor of the building. The Snack Shop is run by an outside company who lease the space from Bergen Community College and run the kitchen aspect of the business. The vending machines and the cafeteria sitting area are still run by the college.
Several years ago when I worked in the Lyndhurst campus to teach a Customer Service course, I challenged the students to redesign the snack shop for business. Walking around the Lyndhurst campus for the first time in four years, I noticed that things had not changed much and it was the same lackluster snack shop.
I started to talk to the managers that worked their and as I got to know them I heard their frustrations about running a business in an off main campus site that had very little traffic due to the amount of students in the building. One of the biggest frustrations was the lack of advertising they were allowed in the building.
Since I had always enjoyed the food and service there and the managers I got to know at the beginning of the semester were really nice I thought this could be an interesting project to see how to look at the business through the students eyes. What would they want to see? How could it be made more desirable for them? If they were given the opportunity to change things, how would they do it differently?
Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. logo
So I arranged my first field trip with the students and on the third week of class, I took them out of the classroom and gave them their first real life marketing assignment. I treated my students to a pizza lunch and sat them down while they ate and told them about their first research paper. They would be writing their first paper on what would they do differently. I wanted to see the individual ideas that they could come up with on their own. I thought the pizza was pretty good that afternoon and would be a good start.
So I opened Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc., my fictional consulting company for my business classes, again for business and made them all Marketing Consultants in the company. This was their first corporate gig with the company.
BCC-Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. Snack Shop Project 2020
In the next class, I brought the manager, Deborah, in to discuss some of the issues she had running the business and the successes that she had with creating a menu within the guidelines of the company she worked for and the students that she catered to in the building. The students, many of them whom have worked or are working in the food service industry understood what she was saying. It was a very engaging question and answer session.
I gave the students a week and a half to write their papers and submit them to me. I have to say that I was very impressed with the ideas that the students had to promote the Snack Shop, ideas on new signage, ideas to expand the menu with more international foods (I hate the word ‘ethnic’), creating a new design for the facility with a nicer paint job and rounded tables for better conversation and more social media promoting.
The student consultants came up with interesting menus, dynamic graphics for logos and interesting concepts in social media marketing that included Facebook, Instagram and Snap Chat. I had not even though about these things and the students really enlightened me even after all my years of marketing.
Most of my students got ‘A”s on their papers and since they all did such a good job and I was impressed with their input, I broke the students into teams of three and had them work together to present their ideas as a group, pooling their papers together and creating new ideas as a group to present the project to myself and the Management team of the Snack Shop that included the head of Bergen Community College’s Campus Foodservice.
On the afternoon of February 17th, we spent class time with all the student groups giving their presentations to myself, the manager of the Snack Shop and the head of Campus Foodservice. I have to say that all three of us were impressed with what we saw. Each student group came up with a Power Point presentation of their work, pooled their ideas, created multiple logos and new concepts of marketing.
Many came up with new ideas for menu changes and new food items to be served. Their ideas of signage with new catchy names for the Snack Shop and new menu design had the three of us shaking our heads in amazement. I have to say that I was very proud of what students could accomplish in a two week period and the cause and affect of the business.
Needless to say within a two week period of the presentation, the Management Team of the Snack Shop renamed it the “Bulldog Cafe”, revised their menu, added things like freshly baked cookies and some ‘International Items’, got a table on the first floor entrance to post their menus, started posting signs in the elevator, got the cafe mentioned on the “Bergen Daily” email posting every week (our online campus newspaper) and even opened a Facebook and Instagram accounts to promote the new “Bulldog Cafe”. They even started a bonus program that if you bought a certain item multiple times, you would get a free item. It was very impressive what from the project was able to be incorporated into the business.
The new “Bulldog Cafe” concept
Traffic in the cafe seemed to be on the uptick right before we left for the Spring Break. Then came the extension of the Spring Break due to the Coronaviris outbreak and then the closure of the College for the rest of the semester. So we will never really know what the end result would have been by the end of the Spring Semester but I know that as a businessman and a restaurateur that we would have seen big changes in the business in the new “Bulldog Cafe” concept.
Congratulations members of the Bergecco-Parc Consulting Team for your hard work.
Good Luck to the Lyndhurst Team as they promote next “Historical Bergen County: From Revolution to Revelation”, our big team project.
Some of the Logos the Students came up with:
Some Team members were very creative:
They were insightful:
They even did menu’s:
The Team Slide Show Presentation:
The Team Video Presentation:
mywalkinmanhattan 
I want to congratulate the student consultants at Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. for their hard work in raising the bar at the company and for making the Bulldog Cafe the success that it became.
CEO & Co-Founder, Professor Justin Watrel, Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc.
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