Recipe for Success: Growth and Evolution at Cafe Cupcake
Café Cupcake (CC) is a fast-casual restaurant chain that offers artisan cupcakes and light fare throughout the southeastern United States and Texas. This case chronicles the growth and evolution of Café Cupcake. It also considers the specific human resource challenges the company's leaders face at the end of the case as they attempt to scale CC's business concept. By 2018, Café Cupcake had achieved several significant milestones. It operated 35 cafés with almost 700 employees. Its unique restaurant concept and distinctive cupcakes fueled rapid growth, which led to a more complex, vertically integrated organization. The original founding team of Emma Bisset and Aneisha Davis recently added Dr. Jonathan Patel, an expert in organizational behavior and human-resource management, who turned down a partnership offer at a leading consulting firm to become Café Cupcake's chief operating officer. The case looks at the organization from the partners' point of view. Anticipating continued rapid growth, the partners question how Café Cupcake should respond to strategic, human resource, and organizational challenges that lie ahead. What will best position the company for future success? What organizational practices should the partners sustain, drop, or add to enable this success? The Café Cupcake case highlights the organizational challenges that companies face as they grow and evolve. It can be used in an introductory undergraduate or MBA course to illustrate how to manage organizational change and scale new ventures. It is also appropriate for advanced electives in Organizational Behavior, Leading Change, Strategic Human Resource Management, and Entrepreneurial Management or in an Executive MBA program.
Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Human Resources; Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Food and Beverage Industry;
Citation:
Mayo, Anthony, and Heather Beckham. "Recipe for Success: Growth and Evolution at Cafe Cupcake." Harvard Business School Brief Case 919-509, October 2018. View Details