From April 18 to May 7, a group of students opened Café Chaeum as part of a social enterprise class project. Chaeum proposed the theme “philanthropic and healthy shop,” with long-term goals of offering free barista lessons, providing jobs and donating proceeds to low-income Korean families. The KAIST Herald interviewed juniors Jang Heon Kim (Mechanical Engineering) and Eun-ji Lim (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), who were serving fair trade coffee and organic We Can Cookies at Café Chaeum on a Monday afternoon.

What is Café Chaeum?
Café Chaeum is a test market coffee shop located at the I&TM Lounge in N5. Our long term goals for the future include creating employment positions and helping the low-income demographic with educational opportunities. We would like to create an educational institution called “experience school” by reinvesting the proceeds from Café Chaeum to this institution. Currently, we are making slow progress towards our goals.

How did you first come about the idea of running a coffee shop on campus?
We opened the café as part of a project for Professor Joosung Lee’s class called “Special Topics in Management Science: Social Enterprise Management.” Professor Lee’s idea about opening the coffee shop was discussed throughout the year. A majority of students in the class participates in the Café Chaeum project in one of three teams: Marketing, Human Resources and Product Development. Last year, upperclassmen conducted consumer surveys and the teaching assistant for this class currently manages and oversees the overall project.

How is the student response so far?
Surprisingly, there have been more customers than we expected. Café Chaeum initially targeted graduate students at KAIST due to the location, but we have been serving many undergraduate students as well. Not too many people from outside the school visited, but we have had a few regular customers.

Many of the food options offered such as We Can Cookies are organic and handmade. Why did you choose to do so?
The underlying goal of “social enterprise” is to provide benefits to our society. Our main mission for this project has been to serve healthy and delicious products, such as We Can Cookies. Using these high-quality ingredients is not cheap but is nutritious. Another goal is to offer foods that are not readily available for students on campus. Also, We Can Cookies itself is another social enterprise that we wanted to help.

What is the goal of this project? What do you expect?
A personal goal is to establish Café Chaeum as a social enterprise coffee shop throughout Korea. With national approval and proper funding, Café Chaeum will provide barista lessons and specialized, professional café training for those who lack basic human needs. Secondary goals include creating an “experience school” to provide opportunities for low-income families, and to form a sustainable social enterprise.

How has the Social Networking Service Twitter helped your project?
We first planned to use our Twitter page (@ksecafe) to post various discount events at Café Chaeum. But as we decided to lower our drink prices from what we had first planned on, we decided to keep these low prices and instead cancel the discount events. However, regular customers have used Twitter to ask us questions, so Twitter has definitely allowed easier communication. Though we have not seen huge marketing advantages through Twitter, we do have many followers.

Where will the proceeds from Café Chaeum go?
Most of the proceeds from Café Chaeum will go to the “experience school” to fund its operation, as well as to help underprivileged families around Korea. However, our project is still a small-scale test market and as of now not official. We are still trying to figure out how to stabilize our income to prove our value as a social enterprise organization

Do you have any last comments?
Many people do not seem to realize that we are running under a temporary test market period. Café Chaeum is not a long-term coffee shop on campus and is still working towards our official opening. Hopefully Café Chaeum will be remembered until then.