Rise Up Coffee Roasters will open a kiosk on the Arnold campus in November.
The kiosk, in the CALT atrium on West Campus, will sell coffee, smoothies, pastries and breakfast sandwiches.
“We haven’t ever had a real coffee shop on campus,” Peter Kaiser, AACC’s events and food services manager, said. “I think [this is] good for the students. And it gives them one more option.”
The coffee shop will join three other food service locations on campus: Subway in the Careers Center, Chick-fil-A in the Health and Life Sciences Building and the Hawk’s Nest in the Student Union.
Kaiser said the college decided to put Rise Up in CALT because of the lack of food service on West Campus.
“Now that students are coming back to campus, and there are more students on the west side of campus … we started to pursue putting something over there,” Kaiser said.
Rise Up will move into the space left by Chick-fil-A after it moved into the Health and Life Sciences Building in 2021.
Kaiser said because all the infrastructure was already in CALT from when Chick-fil-A was there, the college only had to paint the space and replace the counters before Rise Up could move in.
“The power is already there,” Kaiser said. “There’s no special ventilation that [needed] to be done for what they have. … We don’t have a whole lot of stuff to do to make it fit.”
Isabelle Murray, a second-year creative writing student, said the coffee shop will be worth the trek to West Campus from her classes on East Campus.
“It’s not a big deal for me to do that walk,” Murray said. “It will be … a reason for me to stick around campus longer.”
The coffee shop is the last of the food options planned for the Arnold campus, according to Kaiser.
“We’ve got a good variety,” Kaiser said. “I don’t know that the college could really, you know, support another one.”
Mischa Green, a first-year film studies student, said she likes having a coffee shop on campus but it isn’t worth the hike to West Campus.
Rise Up Coffee, a Maryland-based chain, has 11 other locations around the state, including in Arnold, Annapolis and Edgewater.
