Empire State of Food
Hi! We’re Prasenjit Roy and Leanna Mulvihill. We are master’s students at Cornell Tech studying information science. We are working on building a model using data science to allow many farmers with diverse products collaborate to supply institutional buyers like hospitals or schools.
The idea is that for institutions, it is too complicated to deal with many small farmers as vendors. But, if the farmers have a way to work together and spread the risk, they could sell to buyers they never would have had access to before.
In our model we would be matching the buyer’s weekly orders to the farmers’ weekly availabilities so that the buyer is always sourcing X% of their purchases locally within their given budget.
If you’re a farmer and you have 5 minutes — please fill out this survey.
If you’re a dining services manager or a farmer we would love to talk to you. Please email lpm36(at)cornell(dot)edu.
Stay tuned for our adventures in gathering data from farmers and buyers and figuring out how to make this work!
