Hiring, scheduling, and the conversations no one wants to have – managing a coffee shop, employees and all.
Drop it in alongside your HR or management coursework—Kaldi’s Coffee HR Sim is built with faculty at Mizzou’s Trulaske College of Business for the concepts that don’t stick from a lecture alone.
Turn a team around in the first weeks as manager.
Become the new manager of Kaldi’s Coffee shop — on a college campus, in a hospital, or on a busy city corner. Who to hire, how to build the schedule, conduct a performance review and what to do when someone’s underperforming: every decision must be made, and every decision shows up in the team. The HR and workforce management concepts that are hard to internalize from a textbook turn into choices with consequences, as a real staff reacts to how they’re managed.
It still teaches HR management. It just feels like running a coffee shop.
Platform
Web App
Audience
Undergraduate Retail Marketing and HR Students
Genre
Web
Content
Human Resources / Workforce Management
Built with faculty. Tested in real classrooms.
Kaldi’s Coffee Sim was built directly with Trulaske faculty — Katie Essing, Courtney Cothren, and Anthony Vatterott — and tested the way it matters most: in an actual classroom. It’s been used in Katie Essing’s Retail Marketing class, where students ran their shop and watched the kind of management decisions that are easy to skim past in a textbook turn into something they had to actually own.
It’s one half of a bigger simulation.
Same shop, different lens — see the retail and marketing side of Kaldi's Coffee SimWe’re recruiting classes to run the shop.
Kaldi’s Coffee Sim is in active use at Trulaske, and open to other business schools who want the same hands-on management training. Interested in bringing it to your program? Reach out and we’ll talk about what that looks like.
Partner with UsStatus: In Active Use
Kaldi’s Coffee Sim is in active use in Trulaske’s Retail Marketing curriculum, with students stepping into the manager’s seat every semester.
View Developer RoadmapSupported by
Kaldi’s Coffee Sim is funded by the Trulaske Experiential Learning Fund.
Meet the Devs
This team spends as much time thinking about how a real manager handles a tough conversation as they do about what makes a coffee shop fun to run. Here’s the crew who’s bringing Kaldi’s Coffee HR Sim into the future.