Snack Cart

This year the Healthy Snack Cart provided an important service for the Challenger Community. Three days a week we sold a variety of healthy snacks to students and staff. Snacks were sold in the morning before classes to be used at snack time. The Snack Cart also become an important part of after school programs since students spent such a long day at school. The Snack Cart helped them find the energy to enjoy classes and sports.

Before we decided which snack could be sold we had to research the nutritional information on each snack, what it would cost us to purchase the snack and decide on an appropriate resale price. The next step was to plan our shopping trips by making a shopping list, deciding on how many of each snack we wanted to purchase, and how much money we needed to take with us. The next step was to arrange for our transportation to and from the store. We had to work with the staff at the other campus to try to get a van to make the trip. Scheduling transportation between all of the other off campus activities became quite a job. We need a van to make all of the shopping, college, job transportation trips!

Once we arrived at the store our job was to locate, check out and pay for the items. We used pennies that were donated to the school to turn into cash credits at the coin exchange machine in Kroger to pay for some of our groceries. On our trips to Kroger, we saw one of our graduate students, Adam working in his Kroger uniform.

Once back at school, we have to unload and put the items away. Our next step was to individually package items if needed and stock to cart for selling our great treats to the students. Selling involved keeping track of what was sold, taking money and making change. Of course, making sure that our customers were happy was one of the most important jobs of each day.

The reports we generated included balancing and recording and totaling the daily sales. We also created a “Deposit Report” for the end of each week and recorded our sales and purchase information on our Profit and Loss sheet. This first year of the Snack Cart business was very successful. We had sales of $1356 and made a profit of $378. We used many of these funds to purchase products for the upcoming summer school program.

For further information, contact lifeacademy@tmschallenger.org.