A café built entirely on a preschooler's imagination is about to open its doors on Olive Boulevard. Café O’Play, dreamed up by children at Urban Sprouts Child Development Center in University City, will open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. beginning October 21, serving specialty coffee, breakfast, lunch and kid-friendly fare out of the nonprofit's 6757 Olive campus.
The idea started small: teachers at Urban Sprouts noticed children incorporating coffee shops into their pretend play, and rather than let it stay make-believe, the center let kids run with it. According to St. Louis Magazine, Urban Sprouts children voted on the café's name, a kid-created riff on café au lait, and also created its menus, prices, a café blueprint, and original artwork. The logo, which resembles a smiling coffee mug, even incorporates the children's own handwriting.
Joey Saunders, chief of strategy and advancement at Urban Sprouts, said the café reflects trust in a child's vision, per the same account. Alexis Qualls, the center's director of storytelling and engagement, added that Café O’Play is not intended for people who do not want to hear children in the background — the noise, in other words, is the point, not a bug.
A Menu With Local Roots
Café O’Play is expected to offer pastries, cookies, croissants, salads, bowls and breakfast burritos alongside a dedicated kids' menu, the report notes. The coffee beans will come from Goshen Coffee Roasters, based in Edwardsville, and from the Show Me The World Project, a youth-run coffee venture that trains University City High School students across the entire supply chain — including hands-on visits to Costa Rican coffee farms, according to UMSL Daily.
Founded by Samantha Lurie and Sylvester Chisom, the Show Me The World Project won the $50,000 top prize at UMSL's Anchor Accelerator in December 2024 and expanded into 16 regional Schnucks stores that spring, per UMSL Daily's reporting. Sales proceeds from the coffee fund international educational travel and scholarships for St. Louis-area students from under-resourced schools. Café O’Play will also serve tea from Big Heart Tea Co. and milk from Rolling Lawns Farm, and Urban Sprouts may eventually add ingredients grown in its own garden to the menu, per St. Louis Magazine.
Funding Tuition and Fighting Food Insecurity
Every purchase at Café O’Play will support Urban Sprouts' broader nonprofit work, with revenue earmarked to fund scholarships for families struggling to afford tuition. The center hopes to eventually use the café to help revive a food-access program that would provide nutritious evening meals to children and families experiencing food insecurity — though that expanded program is not expected to launch before 2027, St. Louis Magazine reports.
Food access is not new territory for Urban Sprouts. The organization expanded its food operation during the pandemic and served roughly 3.2 million meals between 2021 and 2023 at sites across St. Louis city and county, before a policy change required participating families and children to consume meals on-site.
The stakes behind that mission are steep. Urban Sprouts serves more than 70 percent children affected by poverty in some way, and as of October 2025 the center supported 140 children while maintaining a waitlist topping 600 families, according to KSDK. Running on a $4.4 million annual budget, the center relies on $2.5 million in yearly fundraising to keep care free or deeply subsidized for two-thirds of enrolled families — a financial tightrope founder Ellicia Lanier has walked since starting the center in 2009 with just 30 children.
Child Care Costs Squeeze Families Regionwide
That local strain mirrors a broader affordability crisis. A May 2025 report from the St. Louis Fed found that average annual child care costs range from $10,000 to $15,000 per child, a burden that pushes parents — particularly single mothers — out of the workforce entirely. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers child care affordable only when it costs 7 percent or less of household income, a threshold few families near Café O’Play's price point can meet without subsidy.
Café O’Play is designed for children and their grown-ups alike, and it's meant to support families beyond preschool. The café will play a role in a new after-school program for children ages 5 to 12 that Urban Sprouts plans to launch in early September, using the café itself alongside the center's gardens, art studio and classrooms. The program, built in partnership with the School District of University City and Turn the Page STL, will provide literacy tutoring, and children will help plan what's grown and cooked at least once a week.
A Bigger Campus, A Bigger Mission
Café O’Play isn't opening in isolation. Urban Sprouts held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in late August co-hosted by center alumni to celebrate a broader campus expansion that pairs the café with Good Soil, a new wraparound services building for local families, according to the St. Louis American. University City Mayor Terry Crow spoke at the event, commending Urban Sprouts for extending its support beyond classroom walls to benefit the broader Olive Boulevard corridor.
The Good Soil initiative also includes a teacher housing program aimed at addressing regional child care staffing shortages, with plans to grow from a single home to 26 housing units over five years, modeled after a similar educator retention effort in Connecticut. Urban Sprouts students voted on colors during the expansion process, extending the center's child-driven design philosophy from the café to the campus itself.
That philosophy traces back to the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education that Urban Sprouts follows, in which teachers act as facilitators rather than instructors and continuously adapt classroom environments based on children's self-directed interests. Under that framework, developed in Italy, the physical environment functions as a child's third teacher — a principle Urban Sprouts has now extended from its classrooms to a working café.
The Olive Boulevard campus itself has grown considerably since Urban Sprouts bought the 14,000-square-foot former McCarthy Spice & Blends manufacturing plant in 2016 for $405,000, consolidating what had been two leased spaces in University City and Olivette. Community lender IFF backed that purchase with a $2 million New Markets Tax Credits allocation, followed by $2.13 million in additional financing and real estate support between 2023 and 2024 to help fund the latest expansion.
