Bright and early on Wednesday morning, senior Jose Nuñez and junior Moo Taw began setting up shop with the assistance of their teacher, Greg Rodrigue.

The students rolled their wooden booth out of a conference room near the school entrance and filled large thermoses with coffee, both decaffeinated and caffeinated, as well as hot water to make hot chocolate. Various add-ons were also available, such as flavored creamers, marshmallows and whipped cream.

With their booth ready to go, all they needed were the first customers of the day. Nuñez and Taw say they’ve had steady business since last Tuesday, when they officially opened for the semester.

“It’s been pretty good. I think we’ve gotten around 80 dollars so far in the last two weeks,” Taw said.

They serve customers Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 8:10 a.m., and the booth is staffed entirely by students from Rodrigue’s early morning entrepreneur class. While Nuñez and Taw did most of the setup on Wednesday morning, two other students from the class — KyLynn Glass and Jackson Matteson — arrived a bit later to help run the booth.

Rodrigue, who specializes in teaching business/career and technical education at MHS, says nine students are responsible for running the coffee shop in rotations, and essentially, they’re doing it independently.

“The beautiful thing about this is just, I’m able to kind of step back. Last week, (the students) got introduced to it and then, you know, now, it’s like it’s their world. They’ve kind of taken the initiative and they’re responding really well to it, so I’m really stoked about it,” he said.

Bobcat Coffee has been a recurring project since 2020, and Rodrigue feels it’s a good way to teach students entrepreneurship skills. Nuñez agrees, as he said he was excited to learn how to advertise, sell products and manage inventory.

“I thought it would be useful to learn some skills — like, you don’t rely on anyone else (while working at the booth),” Nuñez said.

Taw said it had also been a good experience for him as he was learning how to improve things around the coffee shop.

In conjunction with Bobcat Coffee, the students in the entrepreneur class are also completing business plans over the course of the semester to further delve into that set of skills — whether they’re for the coffee shop or another project they find interesting.

The proceeds from the business will be put towards school programs like the department of career and technical education. According to Rodrigue, those profits help fund field trips for the department and help cover the $12 membership fee for the MHS chapter of Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA).

Rodrigue looks forward to expanding Bobcat Coffee’s menu to include other items, but the students are keeping their goals realistic in the early stages.

“It’s just a nice set up that we have right now, with coffee and things like that,” Rodrigue said. “We want to try to integrate other people in our department, for food and what not, but we’re starting off slow right now.”

Bobcat Coffee will be open until the end of the semester and continue to cater to all of the MHS student body and staff’s beverage needs.

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Contact Susanna Meyer

at 641-753-6611 or

smeyer@timesrepublican.com.