Imagine stepping out of a lecture hall on architectural brilliance, walking through manicured gardens under the Mysore sky, and entering a canteen that isn’t just serving food but also teaching you how to run a business. Students in SDMIMD Mysore are doing something radically different. They are managing their mess all by themselves.
This is the untold story of a B-school that flipped the script on campus infrastructure. While most institutions see the canteen or the mess as a logistical afterthought, SDMIMD Mysore students made their campus mess the heartbeat of entrepreneurial learning.
Let’s be honest: in most institutes canteens are operated by external contractors. Students eat, complain about quality, grumble about prices, and move on. The canteen hums along indifferently, divorced from student input. Most importantly Food Wastage ? Who cares!
But what if the canteen was your problem? What if the P&L belonged to you? What if Food Waste is a pain area collectively being thought of ?
Student Entrepreneurship, Real-Time – Real constraints, real stakeholders, and real consequences.
Not symbolically. Operationally.
Every day, students:
– Design the menu based on demand forecasting, ingredient availability, and seasonal trends
– Manage budgets down to the rupee, deciding what to procure, at what price, from which vendor
– Own the P&L : every rupee of profit, every rupee of loss, is visible and theirs to explain
– Track wastage publicly : daily food waste is logged on a board for the entire community to see
Why Public Wastage Tracking Changes Everything
A board showing yesterday’s food wastage isn’t just an accounting exercise. It’s behavioral psychology in action. Sensitising everyone about the fact that approximately 100 million people in India go hungry, while about 142.5 million people (9.8% of the population) are undernourished. (According to recent UN and global food security data.)
When a day’s waste is 18 kg of food, everyone knows.
When the team forecasts demand too high and 20 samosas go unsold, it’s not hidden in a storage room. It’s staring right at you. The canteen team watches their inefficiency in real time. They feel the weight of it. They adjust.
Profit isn’t an abstract number. Loss is personal. Everyone here is a stakeholder.
This is the kind of learning no classroom can simulate:
– Demand forecasting : becomes urgent when your margin depends on it
– Vendor negotiations : matter when you’re spending your own (student-managed) budget
– Operational efficiency : transforms from theory to survival
– Customer empathy : it is different when your stakeholders are your peers, and you see them every day.
– P&L Ownership from Day One : MBA programs talk about accountability. They are living it. The difference between understanding a balance sheet and feeling it in the bones.
– Stakeholder Management in Real Time : Stakeholders aren’t hypothetical. They’re the person sitting next in class, annoyed because the menu repeats too often. They have to negotiate, empathize, and deliver or lose credibility.
– Operational Excellence : Every system in your canteen, inventory, scheduling, procurement is a mini-case study in optimization. You’re applying supply chain logic to dinner.
– Sustainability Has a Bottom Line : Wastage tracking isn’t a noble corporate responsibility theater. It directly impacts your profit. Sustainability and profitability align naturally, don’t have to force it.
– Entrepreneurship Isn’t About Startups : No need for venture funding or a disruptive app to learn entrepreneurship.
Imagine what the mess board reveals over a semester
– Week 1 to Week 4: Wastage high (15–20%), margins thin. The team is learning.
– Week 8 to Week 12: Wastage drops (8–10%), forecasting improves, menu stabilizes based on feedback. Margins tighten.
– End of Semester: A sustainable model emerges. Not perfect, but learned.
Here’s what makes this story interesting for the larger education debate: The canteen isn’t glamorous. It won’t make for impressive LinkedIn posts. But it works because it’s real. You can’t fake a P&L. You can’t polish a wastage board. This is entrepreneurship with nowhere to hide but exactly what prepares you for the world.
Author : nirmalya, Co Founder DebriN Synergy & Campusutra
