The food drive pretty quickly starts asking for things like carrots, which require bed upgrades, which require the greenhouse, which requires far more money than can be made by relying on the food drive rewards to cover bug spray and fertiliser.
Another problem I’ve noticed is that if you ever end up in any debt, because you can’t buy gardening consumables, it wipes out the main pre-bar-sportsday income stream until it’s paid off.
I’ve been doing this run with a lot more emphasis on being a profitable hotel and less on buying anything avoidable like outfits (e.g. entirely missing Maria’s dungeon content because 50 Syls for some ropes was far too much money until she no longer wanted to do things like that). Having thought about it in retrospect, avoiding any story content that required spending more than 100 Syls at once until after the bar sports day upgrades had been purchased would probably have worked out better, but there’s not really anything in game to indicate that getting the last sports day upgrade would suddenly increase the hotel’s income by 4-5x and pay for itself in about a week when nearly every other upgrade has either taken months to cover its own cost or only led to a tiny weekly increase.