Good Times Café: Create a Fast-Casual Experience for K-12

Good Times Café is a customizable café concept developed specifically to help you bring irresistible fast-casual style to your K-12 meal program. Packed full of ideas, tips, free downloads and more, it’s both an online resource for school food programs AND an authentic café concept to wow students with. Turn your entire lunchroom into Good Times Café, or incorporate ideas, recipes and pieces from it. Good Times Café makes your cafeteria a place where kids can feel safe and happy while enjoying the food they love.

Why Good Times Café?

K-12 students are growing up in an age of fast-casual mania. They’re accustomed to elevated fast food: ready-in-minutes items with enticing names and diverse flavors, customizable options to suit their varied tastes and diets, and everything to-go.

Consider the facts:

• Fast-casual restaurants such as cafés and coffee shops are poised to be the fastest growing dining segment in the US over the next five years.¹
• Children make up a large percentage of fast food sales, with one in three kids age 2 to 19 eating at fast-casual concepts daily.²
• The fast-casual industry as a whole increased its revenue 25% between 2002 and 2014, and is expected to increase 41% by 2020.³
• The main forces driving fast-casual growth include customization, on-the-go options and food packaging innovations.⁴
• Gen Z (those born after 1995) spend 1/5 of their budget on food and prefer fast-casual restaurants at a 50 percent greater rate than full-service restaurants.⁵

Convinced fast-casual is the way to go?

Explore Good Times Café to find recipes, inspiration, downloads and helpful articles. From packaging ideas, to café and coffee shop concepts, to how to offer samples in your school, Good Times Café brings fast-casual style to your school meal program.

¹Euromonitor International, April 2018
²Statistic Brain, Fast Food Eating Statistics, 2017
³Revenue of the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry in the United States from 2002 to 2020 (in billion U.S. dollars), Statista, 2018
⁴Quick Service Restaurants Market in the U.S. 2017-2021, Technavio, 2017
⁵The Center for Generational Kinetics, 2017