Drools Pet Food Partners With Tata ClassEdge to Build the Next Generation of India’s Pet Industry Leaders — Starting in the Classroom.
When you think about what is building India’s booming pet industry from the inside out, you think of brands, products, and investments. You rarely think of classrooms.
That just changed.
Drools Pet Food Pvt. Ltd., one of India’s most recognised pet nutrition companies, has joined hands with Tata ClassEdge, the trusted K–12 digital learning platform under the Tata Group, to create structured experiential internship opportunities for school students from Classes IX through XII. In doing so, Drools becomes the first major Indian pet food company to bring the pet industry directly into the school ecosystem — building a conscious bridge between textbook knowledge and the real world of animal science, manufacturing, supply chains, and brand building.
This is not a corporate social responsibility exercise. This is a deliberate, forward-thinking investment in the future of India’s pet industry — and in the young people who will shape it.
Why Drools? Why Now?
To understand why this partnership matters, you first need to understand where India’s pet industry stands today.
Veterinary nutritionist talent scarcity remains a significant challenge, with formulation science expertise concentrated largely in multinational R&D centres, constraining indigenous product development pipelines. The industry needs not just scientists and nutritionists — it needs trained minds in supply chain, e-commerce, marketing, quality assurance, and corporate operations. And right now, very few students in India are even aware that a career in the pet industry is an option.
Drools is changing that thinking — starting with high school.
What Drools and Tata ClassEdge Are Building Together
The partnership between Drools Pet Food Pvt. Ltd. and Tata ClassEdge is designed to give Class IX to XII students something that no textbook can replicate: firsthand exposure to how a real business inside India’s pet industry actually operates.
Through this collaboration, students will have access to structured internship experiences across some of the most dynamic and in-demand domains within the pet food ecosystem:
Animal Nutrition — Understanding how scientifically formulated diets support the health, growth, and longevity of companion animals. For students with an interest in science, biology, or food technology, this is a window into a discipline that sits at the intersection of veterinary science and food manufacturing.
Manufacturing and Quality Practices — Getting a ground-level understanding of how pet food moves from raw ingredient to finished product, and why quality control and manufacturing excellence are non-negotiable in an industry that cares for the health of millions of animals.
Research and Development — Seeing how innovation happens in a real R&D environment — from ideation to formulation to product testing. For students passionate about experimentation and problem-solving, this is career discovery at its most impactful.
Supply Chain — Learning how products reach pet parents across India, from procurement and logistics to inventory management and distribution. In an industry with cold chain and distribution challenges that are actively being solved, this is critical knowledge for the next generation of operations professionals.
Marketing and Brand Management — Experiencing how one of India’s most recognised pet food brands builds relationships with consumers, communicates its values, and competes in a rapidly crowding marketplace.
E-Commerce — Gaining exposure to digital commerce strategy in an industry where quick-commerce delivery now covers 42 cities and is reshaping how pet parents discover and purchase products. E-commerce fluency is no longer optional — it is essential.
Corporate Operations — Understanding the rhythm of a modern FMCG organisation: team structures, decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and the discipline of scaling a business responsibly.
Together, these exposure areas give students a comprehensive map of what a career in the pet industry actually looks like — and why it is a genuinely exciting place to build a professional life.
The Bigger Vision: Industry Meets Education
What makes this collaboration especially significant is the philosophy behind it.
Both Drools and Tata ClassEdge share a foundational belief: that meaningful learning does not happen only inside a classroom. It happens when students see ideas come alive in the real world, when they connect the concepts they are studying to the challenges and opportunities of actual businesses, and when they are given the confidence that comes from knowing their education has direct, tangible relevance to the world they are entering.
Tata ClassEdge’s CEO Tarun Bhojwani has spoken directly to this belief, stating that education today needs to go beyond textbooks and exams — the platform has consistently backed learning approaches that are forward-thinking and experiential at scale.
Drools, for its part, brings something rare to this partnership: a brand with 3,400 employees, manufacturing operations, a $1 billion valuation, and a genuine commitment to the long-term health of India’s pet ecosystem. Drools’ recent ₹180 crore investment in fresh pet food infrastructure and its strategic collaboration with Tetra Recart® is only the latest signal of a company thinking not just about today’s market, but about where the industry is heading over the next decade.
A company that thinks in decades understands the value of investing in the talent pipeline that will carry that decade forward.
What This Means for Students
For a student in Class X sitting in a school in Bengaluru, Nagpur, or Indore, this partnership opens a door that very few of their peers even know exists.
India’s pet industry is growing at a pace that most people outside the business community have not yet registered. Millennials and Gen Z now represent 68% of first-time pet adopters in India — these are people the same age as today’s high school students, and they are driving an entirely new category of consumer demand. The brands, platforms, and professionals that serve them will be the economic backbone of an industry worth billions of dollars within the decade.
The students who walk through Drools’ doors today — learning how animal nutrition works, watching a supply chain in motion, understanding how a brand builds loyalty — are the people who may one day lead this industry. And because of this partnership, they will have started building that knowledge years before their peers.
The program touches on areas like animal science, FMCG operations, digital marketing, and corporate strategy — all of which are directly aligned with the competencies that universities and employers in the pet industry will seek in the graduates of 2030 and beyond.
Drools: A Brand That Has Consistently Thought Ahead
Drools Pet Food was founded in 2009 under the IB Group, a leading ISO-certified protein conglomerate based in Central India. Since then, the company has grown into one of India’s most trusted and ambitious pet food brands — formulating scientifically balanced meals, treats, and supplements for dogs and cats, with a team of in-house nutritionists and veterinarians ensuring every product meets the highest standards of quality and digestibility.
The company has raised $60 million in funding, earned a unicorn valuation, and attracted investment from L Catterton — one of the world’s most respected consumer-focused private equity firms. Nestlé India has also taken a stake in the company, a further signal of the confidence global players are placing in Drools’ trajectory.
What sets Drools apart, though, is not just the funding or the valuation. It is the consistency of vision. The ₹180 crore investment in fresh pet food infrastructure. The Tetra Recart® partnership that introduced a genuinely new format to the Indian market. The veterinary health and wellness programmes that reinforce the brand’s commitment to pet wellbeing beyond the product. And now, a partnership with Tata ClassEdge that extends that vision into education.
Each of these decisions reflects the same core belief: that a great pet industry requires great thinking, great science, great people, and great institutional investment — and that Drools is prepared to lead from the front on all of them.
Tata ClassEdge: A Platform Built to Bridge Learning and Life
On the education side of this partnership, Tata ClassEdge brings credibility, scale, and pedagogical depth that few platforms in India can match.
Founded in 2011 as a subsidiary of Tata Industries, Tata ClassEdge has spent over a decade developing curriculum-integrated learning solutions for Indian schools — covering CBSE, ICSE, and state board curricula through its proprietary MLEX (Multiple Learning Experiences) model. The platform serves thousands of schools across India with interactive digital content, teacher training support, and technology infrastructure designed to make classroom learning more engaging, more practical, and more connected to the real world.
In recent years, Tata ClassEdge has been actively building partnerships that take experiential and skills-based learning to the forefront of Indian school education — from associating with Enlearning Skill Development Limited to scale entrepreneurship programmes to collaborating with Etome Works to build EdTech Experience Centres across the country. The Drools partnership fits naturally into this growing ecosystem of real-world learning integrations.
For Tata ClassEdge’s partner schools, this collaboration means their students gain access to something no curriculum document can deliver on its own: a credible, structured entry point into one of India’s fastest-growing industries.
The Takeaway: India’s Pet Industry Is Building for the Future
There is a sentence in the Drools and Tata ClassEdge announcement that deserves to be read carefully:
“Great learning happens not only in classrooms, but also when students get the chance to see how ideas come alive in the real world.”
That sentence is true for students. But it is equally true for industries.
India’s pet industry is learning — quickly — what it means to grow at scale while holding its values together: quality nutrition, veterinary integrity, supply chain transparency, and genuine care for the animals and families it serves. The brands and platforms that are getting that balance right are the ones that will define the category for a generation.
Drools is one of those brands. And by bringing India’s next generation into its world — through classrooms, through internships, through the curiosity of a fifteen-year-old who didn’t know pet nutrition was a career — it is making a bet on the future that only a confident, responsible, and genuinely purposeful company would make.
The classroom and the factory floor just got a little closer. And India’s pet industry is better for it.
Pets News Network is India’s first dedicated media platform for the pet and animal industry. For brand coverage, advertising enquiries, and media partnerships, contact: ankur@petsnewsnetwork.com
