The Creation of Pinwheel’s Seasonal Menu
Braiden S. - 8th grade
Pinwheel’s seasonal menu provides an array of unique, interesting, and outside-of-the-box drinks. Rotating every few months, our baristas work constantly to come up with new ideas and make sure nothing gets old. But this time around, Pinwheel trusted the students of Embark with the job, and we made the seasonal menu you might be seeing right now. If you don’t already know, Pinwheel is embedded within a school, where students work with baristas in the shop and grow through real-world learning. But, to get back on track, what really happened behind the scenes of Pinwheel’s seasonal menu?
Well, the beginning of our process is pure experimentation. It’s about what comes to mind, what we can build off of that, and building a prototype. This leads to some really weird results, like a curdled cream cheese latte. Maybe you can see why that failed. It is not much different than a scientific process, where we go through phases of design, prototype, change, complete, etc. After building a few prototypes, we gathered feedback from numerous sources (some harsher than others). That includes other students, baristas, mechanics at Framework, teachers, and sometimes even customers. After we gather data points from different perspectives, we log the information and determine the score’s weighted value. For example, if I made a latte, a student may not give accurate feedback because they are not too interested in coffee. But if I made one for a Pinwheel barista, their opinion would be much more valuable because of their refined palette.
“what really happened behind the scenes of Pinwheel’s seasonal menu?”
By now, we can determine which of our prototypes is most appropriate to move forward with. So, we move into this process of making our recipe a thousand times over, changing ingredients the tiniest bit. This process can be really fun, because experimenting with individual flavors and changing tiny things can result in some crazy ideas. After dozens of iterations, and tons of feedback and data gathering, we begin the preparation for a final presentation to the Pinwheel o managers and baristas. But, as long as we managed to incorporate feedback and make something that at least tastes good, we were going to make it onto the menu.
After final feedback incorporation, adults make sure our drinks are suitable for the menu, meaning they are not vanilla tootsie rolls or curdled milk lattes, and they are added and prepared for the next season. So, next time you order a drink off of the seasonal menu, think of how much experimenting and fun happened to bring it to your hands.
