By Ashley Walker
Social Media Editor
Graphic by Qiyuan Zhou

After weeks of preparation, the marketing classes reached out to school to vote on their favorite  burger for their annual Tom & Eddie’s Burger Challenge. The Tom & Eddie’s Burger Challenge is a project where students research and poll to create a burger they think will sell if it is put on the market.

“The contest started here four years ago in an attempt to bring more real-world situations and projects to the business department. The students are divided into groups of three to five and given information about Tom & Eddie’s including its mission statement, current menu, current trends, the some food costs. Their job is to create a new burger from scratch.  In their presentation they must identify the market research that led them to their decision, the cost to product their burger, how much they plan to sell it for, and how they will promote the evening,” marketing teacher Pat Brusveen said.

The best two burgers that are voted on by the student body are then sent and sold next Wednesday at the Tom & Eddie’s Naperville location, and whichever group is able to market their burger the best and sell the most wins. This year, winners created the Smokehouse burger and Ragin Cajun burger. The Rajun Cajun burger was created and marketed by Andrew Ainger, Drew Friedlander, Arya Gottumukla, and Jonathan Anderson. The Smokehouse burger was created and marketed by Tommy Jepson, Andrew Cronin, Jayden Reed, and Mason Andou.

“We enjoy the creativity that our teacher, Mr. Brusveen, allowed us to have with the project. From the first day, he let us decide what our burger was and how we were going to market it. We put up flyers around the school and used social media to get the word out about our burger. We felt that those would be the most effective ways of marketing our burger to the target market which is the students at Metea,” junior and co-creator of the Ragin’ Cajun burger Jonathan Andersen said.

The marketing students met with the managers of Tom & Eddie’s to find out information about the business, and which items were most popular at the Naperville location.

“It was fun to create our burger because you actually get to see your own burger go into a restaurant and actually have them create it for you and have people buy it. You’re becoming your own business man in high school, so you get to experience real world stuff,” co-creator of the Smokehouse burger Tommy Jepson said.

Both the Ragin’ Cajun ($8.49) and the Smokehouse ($7.99) burgers will be on the menu at the Tom & Eddie’s, located in Naperville, next Wednesday from 4-9 p.m.