Graduate students win first place in TCU case competition

Four Rutgers Business School graduate students won Texas Christian University’s Supply Chain Case Competition after spending 24 hours developing a strategy for distributing a new Frito-Lay snack during the 2026 World Cup.

The Rutgers team – made up of Full-Time MBAs Badri Venkatanathan, Pilar Grullón, Suman Venkat, and specialty master’s student Mansi Sheth – bested five teams to advance to the final round, where they won the $14,000 first prize. The competition attracted 20 student teams, including one from Germany. 

“We went through a lot of different emotions, from holding our heads in our hands to extreme joy when we won,” Venkat said days after the competition. A win at TCU had also eluded Rutgers for six years. “It made everything so much sweeter,” Grullón said.

Case competitions are popular among business school students because they give them an opportunity to demonstrate what they’ve learned in classes to solve a real-world problem, to network and add a colorful talking point to their resumes. 

The TCU case focused on supply chain, requiring the teams to forecast demand for an untested new product, address production capacity and develop a strategy for how to keep vendors supplied with the new snack. They also had to consider how demand for existing Frito Lay snacks might be impacted by the launch of a new product.

The Rutgers students said they received the case at 7 a.m. after arriving in Texas the previous afternoon. They spread out across a large classroom with their laptops and multiple white boards and started crunching numbers and brainstorming ideas.

They were eight hours into the case when Venkatanathan, strolled quietly across the room, carrying his laptop. The numbers weren’t making sense in their forecasting models. “We’re going down the wrong path,” he told the others. It was a moment the students remembered as part of their “trauma bonding.”

“We had to recalibrate everything,” said Venkatanathan, who the other students recognized as team leader because he had the most experience doing case competitions. They erased the whiteboards and started over.  

As they went through the case again, Grullón and Sheth discovered something that helped the team pivot successfully – and ultimately helped them to win the competition. All the calculations, they realized, had to be based on snack-size products not family-sized and not a mix of both. “It was the lynchpin,” Venkatanathan said. 

Grullón said the team choose not to base their plan on a Superbowl scenario but instead included elements of Swiftonomics and the Messi Effect, incorporating things they knew about the economics around Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour and the effect of Argentina soccer player Leonardo Messi’s appearances at matches in Miami.

The approach won Rutgers points for creativity. But the team also did a comprehensive analysis, forecasting snack demand for 7 weeks leading up to the World Cup, a period that included long summer holiday weekends and ceremonies opening and closing the event.

They considered details like the limited shelf space in the stadium kiosks. To keep supplies replenished, they proposed a fleet of small vans – “a distribution center on wheels,” they dubbed it – for quickly shuttling the product from larger trucks parked outside the venue.

Venkat remembers feeling exhausted and a little panicked around 4 a.m. “We had three hours to go,” he said, “and we had a lot to do.”

Still, the team decided to take on the bonus portion of the case, too – something they felt would differentiate them. They decided to have fun with it, incorporating local details like the Texas Torpedo so cleverly, that one judge was stunned when she found out they weren’t from Texas.

When their 7 a.m. deadline arrived the next day, the team submitted a 45-slide deck. Grullón said she took a 30-minute nap while the others stayed awake. The team made its first- round presentation at 11:30 that morning.

Professor David Dreyfus, who assembled the team and served as advisor, videotaped the team’s first round. When they learned that they would advance to the final round, the Rutgers students studied the video to refine their presentation.

The final round presentation that afternoon took 25 minutes and six minutes of questions from the judges. “When we finished,” Grullón said, “we knew we had aced it.”

Dreyfus said the team received accolades from the judges and other competitors throughout the competition about their analysis, creativity, their presentation skills and how they acknowledged the brand. The reasons for their win were reinforced later he said when a representative from Frito-Lay approached the Rutgers students and asked them to share their forecasting spreadsheet.

“This competition is one of the premier graduate-level supply chain management case competitions in the nation,” Dreyfus said. “Our students competed and won against the best. I'm thrilled about their success and the recognition they have received.” 

Looking back on the experience, the students said their success was tied to figuring out the forecasting model after their misstep. “The model that we came up with was so robust,” said Sheth, who is completing a Master's in Healthcare Analytics and Intelligence. “The judges really appreciated it. If we had given up and just moved onto other things, we would not have been in such a good position.”

Grullón marveled about how the team – most of them were only acquaintances before the competition – worked together and bonded through the experience. “Everyone contributed different things at different times,” she said. “The team dynamics were incredible.” 

- Susan Todd