Mondelez sweetens up the Maestros Case Launch at SPJIMR

Walk into most case-launch sessions, and you brace yourself for a slide deck. Walk into this one, and you’re treated to a highlight reel instead. Sayali Satoskar from the HR team opened the session not with objectives and timelines, but with some of Mondelez’s most iconic ads, starting with the properly old, nostalgia-inducing Cadbury spots and working forward through the years. The reel built up to the newest ad in the mix, the one that had the room leaning forward: an AI-powered spot where any small shop owner can key in their store’s name and watch Shah Rukh Khan say it back to them on screen, as if he’s personally rooting for their business. It was clever, it was warm, and it set exactly the tone Mondelez seemed to want for the evening.

Trivia questions kept popping up between ads, and every right answer, sometimes every enthusiastic guess, earned a chocolate. By the time the ad reel wrapped up, wrappers were already piling up on desks.

Next came Gurpreet Singh, Product Commercialisation Lead, who took the room on a tour of Mondelez’s brand portfolio, pausing every so often to quiz the audience on which product he was describing (more chocolates changed hands). Alongside the brand talk, he shared slices of his own journey, having been with Mondelez since 2017, growing alongside the company.

Harshit Pandey, the o9 Implementation Lead, followed up with the quieter, behind-the-scenes half of the story: which plants Mondelez owns outright, which manufacturing processes it outsources, and how the supply chain gets a chocolate bar from the factory to the shelf. He’d joined the same year as Gurpreet. Listening to the two of them trace nearly parallel eight-year journeys at the same company gave the session an easy, unscripted warmth. It was less of a ‘corporate presentation’ and more like two colleagues reminiscing about a place they clearly enjoy working at.

The evening’s final act belonged to Shilpi Agarwal, an SPJIMR alumna, who walked everyone through the two Maestros supply chain cases the company will be tackling this year. one for the first year and another one for the second year. Breaking down what each was really asking in a way that made the problem statements feel approachable rather than intimidating.

A lively Q&A closed things out, but honestly, the real takeaway of the evening wasn’t a framework or a case brief. It was the sheer number of chocolates that students left on every seat. Treats galore, quite literally.

Key takeaways

Participant reflections