A Sector That Trained by Accident
India’s hospitality industry employs an estimated 40 million people and is growing at a pace few sectors can match. The food service market alone crossed $56 billion in 2025, with projections pointing well past $130 billion by 2034. New hotels are opening across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities at a rate that would have seemed ambitious five years ago. The numbers are, by any measure, impressive.
What has not kept pace is the training infrastructure behind them.
Annual attrition in India’s restaurant sector runs between 30 and 60 percent depending on the segment. A significant proportion of hospitality workers are trained informally through observation, imitation, and on-the-job trial-and-error rather than through any structured programme. The gap between the experience a hotel or restaurant promises its guests and the preparation its staff actually receives is, in most cases, substantial.
Adevo Academy was founded in January 2021 specifically to close that gap. The firm’s three co-founders Brendon Pereira, Krishna Shantakumar, and Rashmi Koppar arrived at the same problem through different routes, and built something that reflects all three perspectives simultaneously.
Three Careers, One Diagnosis
Pereira spent three decades moving between hotel F&B management, corporate finance, and strategic consulting, from F&B Manager at Le Meridien and TGI Fridays to CFO of an NSE-listed company. He holds an MBA from SPJIMR and completed an MDP in Mergers and Acquisitions at IIM Ahmedabad.
Shantakumar spent 30 years on the other side of the business, building restaurants that became institutions in Bangalore’s dining landscape. The 13th Floor, ASEAN On The Edge, and Ebony properties defined a certain era of the city’s F&B culture. He is also a published food writer with work in leading Indian newspapers and journals.
Koppar brings a third dimension: 27 years spanning luxury hotel operations at Taj and Oberoi, followed by an extended academic career at Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, where she rose to Deputy Registrar and Academic Registrar while designing hospitality curricula at the institutional level.
The consensus among the three, when they founded Adevo, was that India’s hospitality training problem was neither a talent problem nor a willingness problem. It was a systems problem. The sector had been training by instinct for decades. What it needed was a firm that could build the systems and train to them.
What the Model Actually Looks Like
Adevo operates across four channels. The physical academy in Bengaluru with its training restaurant and housekeeping laboratory, handles in-person, hands-on training for individual learners and corporate cohorts. On-site delivery takes the same programmes directly to client premises across India. A live LMS platform at lms.adevo.in hosts more than 100 modular courses across F&B service, kitchen operations, food safety, housekeeping, and leadership available in English and Indian regional languages. And for larger organisations, Adevo offers full-cycle L&D outsourcing: taking over the entire learning and development function so clients do not have to build or maintain one in-house.
The client list that has gathered around this model is striking for a bootstrapped, four-year-old firm. The Phoenix Mills Limited. General Mills India, for whom Adevo built an upskilling programme covering 6,000 bakeries across India, trained 64 chefs under a Train the Trainer format, and produced seven content modules spanning sales, sanitation, and inventory management. Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru. JSW Foundation, where Adevo runs a community hospitality training academy in Toranagallu for rural youth in Bellary district. And a long roster of Bangalore’s most recognised restaurant and bar brands.
The outcomes, where measurable, are specific. Kling Brewery and Kitchen, one of Adevo’s F&B clients, now consistently maintains a 4.8-plus rating on Google following structured service training, a concrete, public, trackable metric in a sector where training investments almost never produce numbers you can point to.
What It Points Toward
India’s hospitality sector is at an inflection point. The infrastructure is being built. The demand is real. The workforce challenges chronic attrition, inconsistent training, an undertrained supervisor layer, and a geographic expansion into Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets that outpaces skill development is also real, and growing.
Adevo is not the only company addressing it. But it may be the only one doing so with a founding team that has actually run the operations it is now training people for.
That distinction, practitioner-built, not consultant-designed is what the training room on International Airport Road is quietly trying to prove, one briefing at a time.
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