Venture For Good brought "Design Your Own Restaurant" to STEAMpark New Jersey — a single live session that compresses the full VFG curriculum arc into sixty fast-paced minutes: build a brand, price a menu, and pitch it to the room.
STEAMpark New Jersey is a hands-on enrichment space built around exploratory, project-based STEAM learning. Venture For Good partnered with STEAMpark to bring "Design Your Own Restaurant" — a condensed version of the VFG entrepreneurship curriculum — to its students as a single team workshop.
Unlike VFG's multi-week school partnerships, this was a self-contained session: one room, three jobs, sixty minutes. It's built to give students the full arc of starting a business — brand it, price it, pitch it — in the time it takes to run one great workshop.
Teams worked through three stages against the clock. First, they branded their restaurant: choosing a name that was easy to say and hinted at what they sold, sketching a simple one-to-three-color logo, and writing a slogan built from a simple formula — what you sell plus how it feels. Each team closed out branding with a one-sentence mission naming who they served and the good they did, the "Venture For Good part" of every plan.
Next, teams priced their menu. Every team pulled four to six items from the exact same shared pantry list, then set a price for each — one that covered the cost to make it and left a little extra as profit. Because the pantry was identical for every team, the differentiator was ideas and teamwork, not ingredients.
The workshop closed with a two-minute pitch per team: name and logo, slogan, mission, two menu items with prices, and an answer to one question — why should someone come to you?
The pricing segment centered on one formula students could carry into any future venture: Cost + Profit = Price. Walking through a single sample item — a burger that costs $2 to make, sold for $5, netting $3 of profit — made the idea concrete before teams set prices on their own menus. From there, teams learned to price like a pro: round numbers over odd ones, prices that fit their customer, and combo deals that bundle two items for one price.
STEAMpark's format — fast, hands-on, team-based exploration — made it a natural fit for a single-session version of the VFG curriculum. It gave students a real taste of entrepreneurship — brand decisions, pricing tradeoffs, and a live pitch — without requiring a multi-week commitment, and let VFG test how much of its full curriculum arc could run in one high-energy hour.
"Design Your Own Restaurant" travels well — it's built for a single session with any group of students. If you run a school, camp, or enrichment program and want to bring it to your students, we'd love to talk.
Get in Touch →Name, logo, slogan, and a one-sentence mission — who you help and the good you do.
Pick foods from a shared pantry, build a menu, and set a fair price for every item.
Stand up as a team, show the brand and menu, and tell the room why to come.
STEAMpark New Jersey is one of four VFG partnerships. See the full picture — including our founding work at Indian Hill School, our new curriculum for SAIL at Voyagers, and our community program with the Boys & Girls Club of Asbury Park.