Culinary Business Simulation

An Interactive Business Learning Experience for Culinary Students 

• Designed for FCS & Culinary Students 
• Interactive, Hands-on, & Business-Focused 
• Available through Montana Digital Academy 

This engaging simulation package blends culinary arts and business to help students understand costing, pricing, budgeting, and entrepreneurship in the food industry. Through real-world scenarios, students experience the challenges of running a food business, making strategic decisions that impact success. 

Our suite of activities covers a diverse range of business topics tailored specifically for the culinary industry. 

📦 What’s Included? 

🥗 Daily Nutrition Needs & Meal Costs (More Details) 

Students plan meals for an entire day, selecting a main course, side, and beverage for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each choice updates nutritional values, and students track 10 key nutrients to ensure they stay within recommended daily limits. Their final score reflects how well they balance nutrition and cost, making this lab a fun and engaging way to connect financial and health literacy. 

💰 Community Kitchen – Weekly Budget (More Details) 

In this engaging worksheet activity, students step into the role of kitchen managers tasked with planning meals for a community within a specified budget. The student's task is to find out how many meals can be prepared using the $5000 fund. To do so, students will first convert the measurement units of each ingredient from cups/tablespoons and ounces to pounds and gallons. Then they will use the given rate card to calculate the cost of each ingredient and finally, they will calculate the total cost of a meal. 

💰 Needs & Wants (More Details) 

Students begin by selecting an occupation, which determines their weekly available hours and income. They must then allocate their time and money across various lifestyle choices, such as housing, dining, furniture, vacations, and more. As they make selections, they quickly realize that time and money constraints prevent them from fulfilling all of their desires. The lab challenges students to prioritize their needs over wants, reinforcing the real-world concept of budgeting and opportunity cost. Their final score reflects how efficiently they balance needs and wants within their limitations. 

🔺 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (More Details) 

Students experience Maslow’s hierarchy by allocating time and money to different levels of human needs, including physiological needs, safety, love & belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. To achieve a perfect score (100%), they must successfully meet all five categories while managing their resources wisely. This lab helps students understand how personal and financial decisions impact overall well-being and quality of life, emphasizing the balance between basic survival and personal fulfillment.  

🍪 Cookies Inc. – Recipe Ratios (More Details) 

Students start a small cookie business inspired by Grandma’s famous recipe. They must scale up recipes, converting kitchen measurements (cups, teaspoons) into commercial units (pounds, gallons). After determining the cost per cookie, they make purchasing decisions within a budget and set pricing strategies to turn a profit. This lab introduces unit conversions, cost analysis, and pricing decisions in a realistic food bus

iness scenario. 

🍽️ Restaurant Rescue (More Details) 

Students take on the role of business consultants to save a struggling restaurant. The restaurant is losing money due to unstructured spending, and students must analyze return on investment (ROI) and marginal ROI before making financial decisions. They decide where to invest funds—advertising, staff training, hiring, or equipment upgrades—to increase revenue and turn the restaurant into a profitable business. 

🍿 Snack Stand Business (More Details) 

Students run a snack stand during their school’s Family Field Day event, aiming to make $150 in profit selling three types of snacks. Using historical sales data and weather forecasts, they build demand, revenue, and profit curves to plan their purchasing strategy. During the event, real-time weather changes impact demand, requiring students to adjust pricing dynamically to sell their inventory and maximize profits. 

Food Truck Scramble (More Details) 

Students demonstrate that they can manage the operations of a Food Truck company by demonstrating their understanding of the Importance of Location, Pricing with Competition, and Purchasing with Uncertainty.  Students demonstrate their knowledge by placing 10 trucks on the map of their city and then determine the price to charge at each location and the quantity of meals to send to the truck each day.   At the end of the first month, students see the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Competitive Analysis Report for their business.   

🌟 Why FCS Teachers Love This Package 

• ✅ Bridges culinary skills with real-world business decisions
• ✅ Engages students in hands-on, problem-solving activities 
• ✅ Teaches financial literacy through food-based scenarios 
• ✅ Auto-graded, interactive, and adaptable to any FCS class 

📢 Free for all Montana teachers via Montana Digital Academy 

👩‍🏫 Ideal for Culinary, Entrepreneurship, and Family & Consumer Sciences Courses 

Pre-Requisites 

Mathematics 

• Students are proficient in basic mathematical operations. 
• Students can use charts and graphs to interpret data. 

Language Arts 

• Students can read and comprehend a two-page document. 
• Students can write a paragraph on a topic with which they are familiar. 

Critical / Abstract Thinking (Most activities) 

• Students can imagine themselves in scenarios 1 to 3 years in the future.