On October 27th at Riverside Brookfield High School, the Business Communications II students ran a Halloween pop-up truck at all lunches selling Halloween treats made by the Advanced Foods Service students. Patty Sarkady and Patti Farlee are the two teachers who helped the students organize this event.

Sarkady is an applied arts teacher at RB and teaches the business students. She talks about how the idea for this pop-up truck came up.

“This is the first year our business communication has run this too, so my advanced business students have two requirements to create two events,” Srakady said. “This was all their idea and they had to come up with an idea, marketing campaign, all the strategic elements that go into it from purchasing to creating and designing and collaborating with the advanced culinary arts students. So this was their big event, this is the first event out of the two that they have to do this semester.”

Through this event the business students learned about how to run something like a pop-up truck and learned how to market strategically. Sarkady also elaborates on where the money for this event is going.

“So the money goes back into the program,” Sarkady said. “The acting manager for the food truck is taking all the receipts for everything that we paid out, so all of our expenses, and then we’ll compare the profits to it. And then whatever is left over will go back into the activity funds so they can start their next event.”

The food truck was very successful and senior Eric Vasquez from RB talks about what the inspiration for this pop-up truck was.

“The inspiration for the pop-up was something simple, easy, not too complicated and it has been pretty successful” Vasquez said.

This is the first time that the business department has done something like this, but the foods department has done this for a few years. Farlee is a family and consumer science teacher at RB and she talks about her views on the food truck.

“I think my favorite thing about the food truck is the kids get this experience of trying different menu ideas before they mass market it and then the success of marketing, you know actually producing and selling it to the kids,” Farlee said. “It’s all their work. I’m there to facilitate their learning as far as the techniques and the food is concerned, but it’s their ideas and what they are committed to wanting to try.”

The students get a great learning experience about all the aspects of business, but business is not so easy. Farlee talks about what the most difficult part of business is.
“I think the hardest part was just trying to figure out the storage of it and the mass production of it because we do not have a commercial kitchen, and working within our time frame. Time management is one of the harvest parts of planning.” Farlee said.

A high school doesn’t have all the same elements as a business or restaurant would, so the students have to find other ways of making things like this work. Farlee also elaborated about what she thinks is so great about having things like pop-up trucks at RB.

“I just love the enthusiasm that RB has, the students and the facility, and that they recognize that this is all coming from the students,” Farlee said. “So I think it’s such a nice community building event.”