July 21st, 2008
Homeschooling + marketing = great coffee?
I really love coffee. Not Folgers or Maxwell House, but the good stuff. My current favorite is Dean’s Beans’ “Ahab’s Revenge” (with “the highest caffeine content of any organic coffee!”), but there are few things that make me happier than a really good cup of coffee.
So when I stumbled across a story on a small group of homeschoolers who were selling freshly-roasted coffee to learn about business development, marketing, and accounting, I had to read on.
As it turns out, these aren’t high school-aged students, but elementary kids who were taking on this project.
Scout Hunt, a 9-year-old home-schooled student, practices her sales presentation with other students at her Lakeland home.
“I started a home-schooled business. The purpose is to teach me marketing, accounting and social responsibility,” says Scout.
Scout’s mom, Nicole, took the homeschool project another step further and, having written a curriculum around selling this product (called FatBrain Coffee), began selling the curriculum and related lessons on fatbraincoffee.com. Sweet!
Homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but their original motivation of providing hands-on, practical, experience-based lessons to kids really should be. Scout, for one, is actually turning a profit:
The coffee is bought at cost from a roaster in Georgia. The kids sell it for $11 a pound. Scout sells about 15 bags each month.
The profits are well spent. Scout says some money goes to an orphanage in Zimbabwe, some for gymnastics class, some to ties at church and some for savings.
I don’t know if I’ll be giving up my Dean’s Beans anytime soon, but I certainly applaud their approach.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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