On 8 May 2025 we parked one of our APE50 carts outside the Enterprise Cube on the University of Surrey's Stag Hill campus and started pulling shots.
It was our first proper campus pop-up, a day built to test a simple idea: that a coffee unit is one of the fastest, lowest-barrier ways for a student to find out whether they can actually run a business.
Surrey's Stag Hill campus has the Enterprise Cube, the Innovation Cube and the Games Innovation Zone all within a few metres of each other, a corridor students walk through every day, with a start-up culture already built into it. If you want to ask people whether they'd run their own business, that is where you stand.
The cart opened at 10:00am and ran until 2pm. Our team served many cups over the course of the day, espresso, flat whites, lattes and mochas off our house blend, roasted in the UK. The queue never really cleared. Students came out of the Library and the lecture halls, drank a coffee, and stayed to ask how the cart worked, what it costs, and whether they could run one themselves. That last question was the whole point of the day.
We had conversations with students about becoming an operator and collected sign-ups on the day. The pattern was consistent: the barrier was never ambition, it was capital.
If you run a campus enterprise hub, students' union or careers team and want us on site, get in touch.
