The Beginning
“Kapoy baklay padung market”; “Taas kaayo ang pila ig magpalit pagkaon.”
Two sentences from almost all our interviewees that lead us to arguably one of the most prominent problems being faced by students in CMU: the availability and convenience of purchasing food within the campus. In fact, one respondent verbalized that she does not eat breakfast anymore because cooking would cost her a lot of time preparing in the morning and ready-to-eat food are not easily accessible from her boarding house. Another interviewee reported experiencing occasional headaches due to inappropriately timed meals; all of which point to hectic schedules, limited time, and long lines in the market, the university’s primary source of readily cooked dishes. The same goes for a group of respondents who have classes on 12 noon, and therefore, have no time to go to the market anymore to purchase their meals. Moreover, a respondent, when asked about a potential solution that would solve her problems related to this, revealed that she wanted her college to have their own canteen so she would not have to go to the market anymore and queue in long lines just for her to eat.
From this suggestion, we have devised several plans to address the students’ concern regarding food purchasing. Initially, we planned to create an all-around delivery app for products sold in the market yet found it hard to earn money from huge startup expenses. Furthermore, most of the students we interviewed did not want to have additional fees charged to their meals due to tight budgeting, so if an app like this will be launched, they would only avail if it was free of charge – which is concerning not only on the earning prospect of us as entrepreneurs, but also to the accessibility of our app to all members of our target market. Instead, we now plan to convert a mobile vehicle into a Food Truck so to address this issue of different students from different colleges within the school without having to think about very huge startup expenses and can be maintained by providing a variety of food from which students can choose from without the need of building an actual canteen for every college and is still accessible for those within proximity of the parked truck.
Ideally, the truck would serve pack and go and dine-in meals and a “Sulit 59” combo composed of 1 cup of rice, a meat, and vegetable viand/ fruit of their choice to ensure the customer’s satisfaction and the entrepreneur’s profit. This idea is based on an interviewee’s remark that ever since he began boarding at the campus, he could only rarely eat healthy and well-balanced meals due to his tight budget.
From all these, we have realized that conceptualizing a business is really challenging. It needs us to pour a lot of our time and dedication into the work to obtain beautiful results – things that are almost always absent to us, nursing students, due to our very hectic schedules. Accordingly, we have realized that though our schedule is tough, we should use every ounce of our time to work on this closely not just for the benefit of getting good grades, but for its and our potential to help the people we choose to help, in this case, our fellow students at Central Mindanao University.
