Who's started Nanina's Gourmet Sauce?

The college campus, it turns out, can be an ideal incubator for hatching small businesses.

Nanina’s Gourmet Sauce, a pasta sauce company based in Belleville, N.J., was started, for instance, in 2005 by students taking an entrepreneurship course at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J. Nanina’s products are now sold in nearly 400 supermarkets and gourmet shops in New Jersey and Manhattan, and the company’s director of operations is 23-year-old Nick Massari, a student in that class.

The course at Monmouth is one of thousands of similar offerings on campuses across the United States. Undergraduate courses in how to start and run a small business are becoming as ubiquitous as Economics 101. Gone is the conventional wisdom that running a small business cannot be learned by sitting in a classroom.

According to the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., more than 2,000 colleges and universities now offer at least a class and often an entire course of study in entrepreneurship. That is up from 253 institutions offering such courses in 1985. More than 200,000 students are enrolled in such courses, compared with 16,000 in 1985.

The Monmouth course, started in 2005 and taught by John Buzza, a successful food industry entrepreneur who decided to devote his energy to teaching, went well beyond textbooks and lectures.

That first year, Professor Buzza brought along with him a real-world challenge. A chef he had worked with at Nanina’s in the Park, an Italian restaurant and catering company in Belleville, had created a tomato pasta sauce that customers were always asking for, but he had neither the time nor the skills to turn the idea into a business. Instead, Professor Buzza gave his class the assignment of starting a pasta sauce company.

“We had no idea how to begin,” Mr. Massari said. “But instead of getting lectured on how to do it, we went out and did it.” The class of 35 students was split into five operational teams: sales and marketing, finance, information technology, research and development, and production. They spent significant time researching the market, creating a business plan, revising the plans and carrying out a blueprint for getting the pasta sauce on supermarket shelves. The next semester, they took a course in small-business management where they learned to run the nascent company as a business.

The company began shipping its sauce in January 2006, and Mr. Massari, a stellar college infielder who had signed a baseball contract with an independent ball club when he graduated, was asked by the owner of Nanina’s to take over the embryonic business. Giving up his long-shot baseball dreams, Mr. Massari jumped at the opportunity. “I had always thought about owning my own business,” he said.

Select the righ number:

Who's started Nanina's Gourmet Sauce?

1) Professor Buzza

2) Mr. Massari

3) Kaufmann Foundation in Kansas City

4) The Students in Professor Buzza's Class

5) A group of students who used to eat at Italian restaurants