Seneca Foods Foundation donates $10 million to the Cornell Food Venture Center

GENEVA, N.Y. — The Seneca Foods Foundation is donating $10 million to the Cornell Food Venture Center (CFVC) at AgriTech in Geneva.

CFVC at AgriTech works to help food producers of all sizes bring their products to market.

The donation is “in recognition of [a] synergistic 75-year relationship” between the company and Cornell University. Arthur Wolcott, who graduated from Cornell in 1949, bought a bankrupt grape-juice plant in Dundee during an auction.

“Thus began his collaboration with the food science faculty and experts at Cornell as he grew what would become Seneca Foods from a struggling company with $110,000 in revenue its first year in 1949 to the $1.5 billion publicly traded company it is today,” per an announcement on the Cornell Chronicle website.

“Since its launch in 1997, the Cornell Food Venture Center has been a catalyst for food and agricultural business development, bringing more than 40,000 food products to market by connecting entrepreneurs with the resources, expertise and innovation they need to succeed,” Benjamin Houlton, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), said in the Cornell announcement. “This new chapter in Cornell’s longtime partnership with Seneca Foods will ensure that the center’s purpose-driven science provides even greater benefits for our food economy.”

The donation is the largest in AgriTech’s history. It will “grow the food economy in New York state and beyond,” providing new processing and production innovation, regulatory compliance guidance, training, product stability and safety evaluation to the food industry, Cornell said.

“This gift really solidified the partnership that has been ongoing for 75 years between Seneca Foods and Cornell, especially Cornell AgriTech,” Christine Smart, the Goichman Family Director of Cornell AgriTech and associate dean in CALS, said.

Half of the donation will endow the CFVC and name its “state-of-the-art” pilot plant, and the other half will endow a named professorship and director of the CFVC.

“It ensures that we will have outstanding leadership moving into the future,” Smart said, “and will allow companies to look at their processing and packaging to ensure food safety and a quality product. The ability to do things on a small scale in the pilot plant is huge­ – it enables companies to better test the market and predict food trends by trying different things and running sensory panels.”