PVM Confy Challenge 4.0 · Perfetti Van Melle · First Years Only
You register alone, clear a quiz alone, and then get handed a teammate you did not choose.
Season four of the Confy Challenge from Perfetti Van Melle, the company behind Center Fresh, Center Fruit, Alpenliebe, Mentos, Happydent, Chupa Chups and Big Babol. The structure is unlike anything else on the campus calendar. You enter as an individual, sit a thirty question MCQ assessment in your chosen track, and only after clearing it do you get paired with another shortlisted student by your placement committee. What that pair then submits is six slides and a two minute film. Campus winners walk into a PPI for a Perfetti Van Melle summer internship with a stipend of ₹2,50,000.
One of ours
Last year's National Winner and PPI holder from the Confy Challenge is an AceMBA Super100 student. This is a competition where a small, well prepared campus cohort has a genuine shot, because the eligible institute list is short and the field is nowhere near the size of an open national contest.
Who this is for
Seven campuses, three tracks, first years only
Eligibility here is narrow by design. The challenge is open to first year MBA students specialising in Sales and Marketing, HR and Operations from a select group of B schools, which for this edition covers IIM Kozhikode, IIM Mumbai, IMT Ghaziabad, IRMA, SPJIMR, TAPMI and XIMB. If you are on one of those campuses, the competitive field you are actually fighting is your own batch plus six other cohorts, not the twenty thousand strong entry pool of a typical open competition.
Registration is individual. There is no team hunting in the first week, no scrambling for a fourth member, and no dependency on someone else's calendar until the quiz is already behind you.
Commercial Track, Sales and Marketing
The largest of the three and the most contested. Confectionery is an impulse category, which means distribution reach, visibility at the counter, pack price points and trade schemes matter as much as brand love. Expect a brief that touches consumer insight and the route to market in the same breath.
Right for you if you can explain why a five rupee pack sells differently from a ten rupee pack, and can back it with a number.
Human Resources Track
HR briefs in FMCG usually sit around frontline sales talent, attrition in field roles, capability building for a distributed workforce, or culture in a company that markets itself on fun. The assessment tests HR fundamentals before you get anywhere near a business idea.
Right for you if you can turn a people problem into a costed intervention rather than a values statement.
Operations Track
Candy is a short shelf life, high SKU count, temperature sensitive supply chain that reaches millions of tiny outlets. Planning, sourcing, manufacturing efficiency and distribution reliability are all fair game, and sustainability sits close to the surface in packaging heavy categories.
Right for you if fill rates, secondary distribution and cost per case are language you already speak.
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How you enter
Individual participation. Teams are formed later, after the assessment.
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Round one
A 30 question MCQ assessment in 30 minutes, run separately for the HR, Commercial and Operations tracks, based on skills relevant to the track you picked.
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Team formation
Shortlisted students are paired into teams of two by their campus placement committee, with at least one female member per team.
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Round two
A 6 slide presentation in PDF plus a 2 minute MP4 video that shows both the solution and the presenter on camera.
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The prize
Campus winners get a PPI for a Perfetti Van Melle summer internship with a ₹2,50,000 stipend, plus participation certificates.
The button above opens the official Unstop page in a new tab, where registration, the eligible institute list and the live deadlines sit.
The journey, stage by stage
Four stages, and the middle one is out of your hands
1
The filter
MCQ Assessment, thirty questions in thirty minutes
Each track runs its own assessment on the same day and in the same window. Thirty questions, thirty minutes, built around skills relevant to the track you registered for. That is a minute per question with no time to second guess, so it is a recall and judgement test rather than a reasoning marathon. Commercial candidates should expect marketing and sales fundamentals with a consumer goods flavour, HR candidates should expect core HR concepts and labour basics, operations candidates should expect supply chain and process questions.
Revise your term one core, not case frameworks. The people who clear this round are the ones who can answer a 4Ps, a channel margin or a safety stock question in twenty seconds because they revised the week before, not the ones with the best strategy instincts.
2
The part you cannot control
Team formation, your partner is assigned
Students shortlisted from the MCQ round in each track are paired with another participant, and the pairing is managed by the placement committee on each campus. Every team must have at least one female member. So you do not choose your teammate, you inherit one, and the two of you may never have worked together before.
Spend the first hour with your assigned partner deciding who owns the deck and who owns the video, and agree a single deadline that sits two days before the real one. Pairs that skip this conversation lose three days to polite indecision.
3
The submission
Six slides in PDF and a two minute film in MP4
Shortlisted teams submit a six slide presentation as a PDF and a two minute video in MP4 where they explain the idea in detail. The video has a specific requirement that most teams read past: it must show both the solution and the presenter. A voiceover over slides does not meet the brief. Your face is part of the deliverable, which tells you exactly what is being assessed alongside the idea.
Six slides means one idea, not four. Slide one the problem in numbers, slide two the insight, slide three the idea, slide four how it works on ground, slide five the numbers it moves, slide six the ask. Anything else goes.
4
The conversion
Interviews and the campus win
All top shortlisted teams are informed about the interview process over email. Campus winners get the opportunity to appear for a PPI for a summer internship at Perfetti Van Melle with a stipend of two and a half lakh rupees. Note the framing carefully. The PPI is attached to winning your campus, not to reaching a national podium, which is precisely why a short eligible institute list makes this such a favourable bet.
Prepare the interview as an FMCG summers interview, not as a case debrief. Know the brand portfolio, know one thing that is happening in the Indian confectionery market this year, and have a reason for why this company rather than any FMCG.
The video pitch
Two minutes, on camera, in the voice of the brand
This is the round that separates the submissions, and it is the one nobody rehearses. Perfetti Van Melle is an advertising led company. Its brand equity in India was built on films that were funny, fast and memorable, from Center Shock to Mentos to Happydent. When a company like that asks for a two minute video with the presenter in frame, it is not asking for a screen recording of your deck.
Pro tip from last year's submissions
Shoot it like an advertisement, not like a viva
Make the two minute pitch in a creative, advertisement style format with the presenter in focus, exactly the way Perfetti Van Melle's own ads are cut. Energy, a hook in the first five seconds, tight edits, product visible in frame, and a presenter who looks like they enjoy the category. A flat webcam monologue reading the slides is technically compliant and completely forgettable.
Practically, this means shooting on a phone in landscape, in daylight or with one soft light, with the phone at eye level rather than looking up at you. Record your audio close to the mic and cut anything that does not earn its second. Two minutes is roughly three hundred words spoken at a natural pace, so write the script and time it before you shoot anything.
How to run it
Seven things the winning pairs do differently
1
Pick the track by your assessment odds, not your dream role
You cannot reach the idea round without clearing an MCQ in the track you chose. If your term one strength is operations and your ambition is marketing, the honest question is which paper you can score in a minute per question. The PPI is with the company, and the internship conversation is broader than the track you entered through.
2
Do a supermarket aisle audit before you write anything
Spend forty minutes in a modern trade store and a kirana near campus. Look at where Center Fresh sits versus its competitors, what the price points are, which SKUs are stocked at the counter and which are on shelf. One observed detail from a real outlet beats five secondary research statistics in a six slide deck.
3
Treat the impulse category as the whole constraint
Confectionery is bought in seconds, at a counter, often by a child or a person paying for something else. Any idea that requires the consumer to plan, compare or research is fighting the category. Judges who spend their working lives on this will spot that in the first slide.
4
Split the work by medium, not by section
In a pair, the worst split is one person taking slides one to three and the other taking four to six. The better split is one person owning the analysis and the deck while the other owns the script, the shoot and the edit, with both reviewing everything. Two mediums, two owners, one shared idea.
5
Make the deck and the film say the same thing
The video is not a trailer for a different idea. Evaluators watch the film and then open the PDF, and a mismatch reads as a pair that never aligned. Use the same headline sentence in both, word for word.
6
Check the file specs on the day you submit
PDF for the deck, MP4 for the video, six slides, two minutes. Every year submissions get rejected for a PPTX file, a seven slide deck or a two minute eleven second cut. Export, reopen, count, time it, then upload with a day in hand.
7
Rehearse the film at least five times before recording
The presenter is in frame for a reason. Confidence, clarity and warmth on camera are being assessed alongside your idea, and they show up on take five, not take one. Record a practice run, watch it once with the sound off, and fix what your body is doing.
The honest read
Confy Challenge is one of the highest conversion opportunities available to a first year on these seven campuses. A restricted eligible list, an individual entry that removes team politics, a two person final round, and a PPI that is tied to winning your own campus rather than a national final. The maths is unusually kind.
The catch is that the two deliverables sit on opposite sides of the MBA skill set. A tight six slide business case and a two minute advertisement style film shot on a phone. Most students are decent at the first and have never attempted the second. Start the video earlier than feels reasonable.
Registration, the eligible institute list, stage timelines, the sample video frame reference and the FAQ. The authoritative source the moment anything changes.
Center Fresh, Center Fruit, Alpenliebe, Mentos, Happydent, Chupa Chups, Big Babol. Know which brand plays which role before you propose anything for one of them.
Watch six ads back to back before you script your video. You are trying to match the tone of the company you are pitching to, and this is where that tone lives.
Category size, growth rates and segment splits. One credible market number on slide one is worth more than a paragraph of adjectives.
Click any link above to open it in a new tab and explore the resource.
AceMBA · AceCase Pro and Super100
Six slides and two minutes leave nowhere to hide
Short format submissions are the hardest to get right, because every weak sentence is visible. Mentors who have judged these rounds will tell you which slide is carrying nothing.
✓ Expert-led reviews on short deck submissions and video pitch scripts
✓ Track-wise assessment prep for marketing, HR and operations rounds
AceMBA is an independent mentorship platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected to Perfetti Van Melle, Unstop, or any institute or entity mentioned in this article. All competition details, including eligibility, the eligible institute list, round formats, assessment structure, stipend values, PPI opportunities and timelines, are compiled from public sources as of the date of publication and are subject to change by the organisers without notice. The official Unstop listing is the authoritative source for rules and deadlines. Please verify all details there before registering. This article is for educational and informational purposes only.
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