Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

09/24/2026

Getting locally-grown food onto a school lunch tray sounds simple, but in practice, it depends on supply chain infrastructure that often doesn't exist yet.

professor Becca Jablonski contributed to a new USDA report on farm-to-school food procurement, and presented a related dashboard at Climate Week NYC 2026.

In 2022 and 2023, schools spent an estimated $1.8 billion on local food, but many lack the kitchen infrastructure to turn fresh produce into lunches, and without mid-scale supply chains offering local food in convenient formats, that demand often goes unmet. According to Jablonski, supporting farmers isn't just about programs like crop insurance; it's also about building the infrastructure that lets them reach these markets at all.

Her dashboard, built with the NYC Mayor's Office of Food Policy, models tradeoffs across cost, emissions and water quality to help policymakers see what different procurement choices actually deliver.

Read the full story: https://vist.ly/5jpjb

09/24/2026

How does a fast food chain make sure a restaurant in Ohio treats its employees the same way one in Texas does? New research from Cornell's Nolan School, published in Human Resource Management, studied 908 franchised restaurants across 143 U.S. chains to find out.

The answer runs through a group that's easy to overlook: line managers. Corporate standards alone don't move the needle. What matters is whether franchisees invest in training and pay for their line managers, giving them the ability and motivation to implement practices, like selective hiring and better pay and benefits, for the employees they supervise.

As professor Tashlin Lakhani puts it, it's a service profit chain running one level up — just as how a company treats employees shapes how they treat customers, how franchisees treat line managers shapes how those managers treat frontline staff. Skip that step, and the intended outcomes are hard to reach.

Read the full story: https://vist.ly/5jpj6

09/24/2026

New research out of Cornell's SC Johnson College of Business tackles a longstanding problem in consumer behavior studies — the product descriptions used in experiments rarely look like the ones people actually encounter in the real world.

Researchers from Cornell and Singapore Management University developed a method called BRIDGE (Behavioral Research Through Interpretable, Dimensionality-reduced Generative AI Embeddings) that uses generative AI to bring real-world product descriptions into controlled research settings.

Instead of relying on a handful of handcrafted descriptions, BRIDGE uses a large language model to pull real product descriptions, in this case, nearly 120,000 wine tasting notes, and convert them into embeddings, numerical representations of their meaning. Those embeddings then feed into a statistical model that identifies which specific product features are actually driving consumer choices, while controlling for differences in style, length and content.

Read the full story: https://vist.ly/5jpiz

09/23/2026

New research out of Cornell's SC Johnson College of Business challenges a common assumption in personalization: that you need a lot of customer data to make it work.

Khaled Boughanmi, an assistant professor at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, developed an algorithm called MetaTP that can accurately predict someone's music preferences from just five data points — essentially, a handful of songs they've listened to, skipped, or accepted. The findings were published in the Journal of Marketing Research in June.

What makes this notable is the method. Rather than using supervised learning, which predicts preferences based on a song's characteristics, MetaTP uses meta-learning: it's trained on hundreds of thousands of listening sessions, learning not a single song-outcome pairing but the pattern of how a person responds across a small context of songs. That's what lets it adapt quickly, and it can pick up on real shifts in behavior, like a listener's taste turning from upbeat to somber after a breakup, which is normally hard to detect with limited data.

Read the full story: https://vist.ly/5jm7g

09/21/2026

Every business is a hospitality business — that's the case Cornell researchers are making, and it has real implications for how we design for aging populations.

A new paper from the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures, "Hospitality is Humanity," looks at how older adults experience everyday services — hospitals, banks, libraries, not just hotels and restaurants — and finds that the same design thinking that makes a great guest experience also makes services more usable for aging customers. https://vist.ly/5jafy

Treating hospitality as a necessary design ethos improves customer experience for older adults, according to Cornell researchers.

09/15/2026

Congratulations to the at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business on placing in the top 10 in Bloomberg Businessweek's 2026–27 ranking of Best Business Schools! 🎉

This recognition reflects Johnson's rigorous academics, strong outcomes for graduates and the tight-knit community that defines the student experience at Cornell.

🔗 Explore the Cornell MBA here:

Cornell MBA A two-year residential MBA program Led by a world class faculty and top industry practitioners, with deep immersion opportunities, this MBA builds leadership skills and provides you with an Ivy League competitive edge. Schedule Full-time, 2 years Format In person Location Ithaca, NY Star...

09/14/2026

Guy King, MBA ’26, now an associate marketing manager at PepsiCo, shares what sets the Johnson MBA marketing experience apart in a new Poets&Quants feature.

“Johnson is a transformative place," King said. "Today’s marketers and business leaders need to be strong thinkers, doers, and collaborators, and the Immersion sets up Cornell MBA students with a ‘triple threat’ mix of experience: deep foundations in principles and theory, hands-on exposure to a client business challenge and working with others to bring strategy and plans to life. This sets up Immersion-trained new hires for success, both as high-impact interns and after years on the job.”

Read the full story: https://vist.ly/5ifkr

09/10/2026

What started with a love of baking has grown into a 170,000+ follower community for Ivy Woolenberg ’29.

As a sophomore in the Nolan School, Woolenberg is balancing her studies with building Baked With Love By Ivy, where she shares creative desserts, recipes and behind-the-scenes moments from her baking journey.

“To me, having something that’s really physical is very relaxing,” she says. “But it also exercises my creative side, which I enjoy.”

One of her biggest breakthroughs came from a cake that didn’t go as planned. When an upside-down cake split down the middle, she posted it anyway. The result? More than 40 million views.

Today, she is balancing her studies with content creation, brand partnerships and new opportunities to bring her baking to the Cornell community, including a collaboration featuring a Cornell-themed version of the viral “dot cake.”

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She boasts 145,000 Instagram followers—and we have the Big Red ‘dot cake’ recipe she made just for her fellow Cornellians!

09/10/2026

Decades after leaving Cornell, a Hotelie recently mailed a beloved work of philosophy back to his alma mater, returning a piece of his college experience to the place where it began.

It’s a small gesture with a big story behind it, and a reminder that the things we encounter at Cornell can stay with us long after graduation.

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Better late than never, a master’s alum mailed a beloved work of philosophy back to his alma mater

09/10/2026

When cardiac arrest strikes, every minute matters, and getting a defibrillator to a patient quickly enough remains a major challenge.

New research from Dyson Professor Jingwei Zhang explores how cities can improve emergency response by rethinking where automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are located and how they get to patients.

The research finds that traditional, fixed AED networks can be particularly effective in densely populated cities, while mobile AED deployment, such as AED-equipped taxis or ride-hailing vehicles, could help extend coverage with fewer devices and limited budgets.

The findings point to a potential new role for ride-hailing fleets in emergency response, from delivering AEDs to supporting other time-sensitive medical needs. https://vist.ly/5hxxi