SMU Hostel Cafe

Nine of our Ventures’ members have been working on a hostel café project for the past few months. The SMU hostel lacks any sort of food facilities within the hostel premises. Our members took advantage of this market gap and decided to start up Café@ Prinsep to be a form of convenience to the hostel residents. It will be set up in the pantry area of the SMU hostel. The cafe, for now, serves hot and cold beverages, gourmet sandwiches, tacos and instant noodles. It has plans of including ice cream sundaes and other finger foods as it expands. This project also helped these members to experience real business situations and problems encountered while starting up a business. The café has already had a good opening on the hostel sports day. However, a formal opening is on the lines as soon as the contract gets signed, which is in the next few weeks. All food and drink items are reasonably priced from 80 cents to a maximum of 4 dollars for specialty finger foods. The café will also have a sms or call in system which allows residents to place their order when they wake up. Currently, the core 9 owners of the business will be operating the store. However, future plans include getting residents to serve as employees. The café once opened, will operate during peak hours of student demand, namely mornings before students leave for school and late at night. Café @ Prinsep is beneficial to the hostel as it is in a favorable location, provides cheaper snack to students and value adds to the vibrant SMU hostel community! We look forward to seeing you there soon J

Uttara Gupta