Experience Sharing on- Production and Costing

On 19 November 2025, BSc Business Management (BSc BM) students of Embark College had the opportunity to transition from textbook theory to the real world of ethical entrepreneurship with a guest lecture by Pratik Rijal, Co-Founder of Nepal Tea Collective, on Production and Costing. This session aimed to enhance the BSc BM curriculum by demonstrating how key principles such as cost structures and unit economics, as well as operational efficiency, work out in practice within a live, growing business that links Nepali tea farmers to the global markets. At the very beginning, students were able to realize that costing is not only about numbers but also about strategy, sustainability, and the narratives that brands want to convey.

Mr. Rijal took students on a tour of the entire production chain from start to finish, using the story of tea “from leaf to cup” as his thread: cultivation at farm level, plucking and primary processing, quality control, packaging, warehousing, international logistics, and the final delivery of tea to the customer. At every level, he decomposed the nature of the costs incurred at every level – direct and indirect, fixed and variable – and demonstrated how inefficiencies or wastage at any level will have a substantial impact on the ultimate unit cost. To students of the BSc BM who are still developing their background in the field of operations and managerial accounting, the Nepal Tea Collective live case made the abstract much more tangible and realistic.

One of the main focuses of the lecture was on costing as a tool of decision-making and its impact. Mr. Rijal showed how knowledge of cost structures assists businesses in determining products to scale and how to price products and where to invest in process enhancement or technology. He linked such concepts as break-even analysis, contribution margin, and allocation of overhead to practical questions that Nepal Tea Collective had to consider: What product SKUs should be targeted by marketing more than others? In what situations can it be economical to upgrade machinery? What is the best way that the company can pay farmers fairly and at the same time be competitive in the world markets? Connecting costing and ethical sourcing and brand positioning, he made students think about business decisions as ones that are both profitable and purposeful.

The session ended with a question and answer session where BSc BM students asked questions regarding the scaling of a mission-driven brand, managing the changes in the cost of raw materials, and how to balance a premium branding and what a customer can afford. Mr. Rijal encouraged them to regard production and costing as not a back-office issue, but a key part of strategy and value creation and long-term resilience, particularly to Nepali brands that may want to compete internationally. The guest lecture, in the case of Embark College, solidified the connection between academic theory and practice; in the case of the BSc BM group, it provided an experience of an example of how effective fundamentals in production and costing can build entrepreneurial success and effective change among the producers in Nepal.