Announcing the First Annual Intercollegiate Wine Business Invitational Competition

NAPA, Calif. - Sept. 17, 2018 - PRLog -- Today marks a first in how wine and hospitality students learn about the business of wine. Their team goal is to create a great label, sound business plan with corresponding financial models, and win the First Annual Intercollegiate Wine Business Invitational.

This inaugural year's teams include students from wine and hospitality classes at Michigan State University, Washington State University, Penn State, University of Houston, Linfield College and Florida International University.

Under the guidance of Tim Hanni, MW and faculty advisors from each institution, there will be weekly webinars, ongoing support forums and FAQs to keep the students engaged and productive until the contest ends November 1st, 2018.

The winning team is the one that presents the best label, business plan, and financials for their cost of goods and distribution pricing for a $25 Red Wine blend from California. Awards will be given in each of the 3 categories plus the Grand Prize that will be awarded to the team with the best scores for all 3 categories combined. Coordination, tutorials, online webinars and WineBizSim financial calculators are provided the Tim Hanni MW and WineBusinessEducation.com.

Each team will prepare and submit documentation in 3 key areas for their wine/winery:
• Business Plan – Each team provides the mission, vision and goals of the winery, outline sales and marketing strategies and conduct a competitive analysis for their wine.
• Financial Plan for working up cost of goods, establishing wine FOB selling price, plus distribution and pricing financials for establishing selling price of the wine in retail stores, online and restaurants. This part of the project uses the suite of wine profitability calculators created by eCode.me (more details below).
• Wine Label including winery name, wine name and information that meets Certificate of Label Approval standards (both front and back labels including the wine and winery name, verbiage, label graphics, and legal information).

The IWBI provides a hands-on learning opportunity for hospitality, wine business and general business students by creating an engaging and realistic wine business recreation environment. Participation in the IWBI will result in future winemakers, marketers and buyers in both restaurant and retail environments that have the advantage of understanding how this complex and fascinating industry works In turn they will have greater value in their future roles as professionals in every area of viticulture, wine production, marketing, sales or as buyer for stores, e-tailers or restaurants and hotels.

The elements of the competition are set up in a way that each participant on a team, regardless of their general wine knowledge, can focus their attention on various elements of product ideation, brand development production costs, packaging development and decisions, and supply chain costs and considerations in a fun business while also learning to work together as a team to create the business plan, financials and final packaging of their team project for evaluation by the judging committees.

Separate panels of industry experts, journalists, etc. will judge each component of the competition: Business Plan, Financials, and Labels. Evaluation parameters will be finalized by each panel of judges and our committee Awards will be given in each category with Grand Prize for the Best Overall Project.

Visit www.winebusinesseducation.com/iwbi to see the full details of the program.

About WineBusinessEducation.com:
A subsidiary of eCode.me, Wine Business Education provides online wine business courses, live workshops and programs, and works with educational organizations, such as the Napa Valley Wine Academy, wineries, universities and state/regional organizations, such as the Oregon wine Board. eCode.me offers an online suite of WineBizSim financial calculators used in the business classes and also provided to wine businesses to more easily run and forecast wine cost of goods, a sales/marketing portfolio and sales channel workbook, vineyard profit and loss and a complete winery tasting room financial pro forma, and wine pricing calculator for running pricing scenarios. You can get an idea of what these workbooks look by going to the following demonstration links: http://winebusinesseducation.com/workbooks/

For more information contact Tim Hanni MW, 707-337-0327 or tim@timhanni.com