The 2025 Cornell Food Hackathon - November 7, 8 and 9, 2025

The world population is expected to exceed 9 billion by the middle of this century. Nearly a billion people around the world still suffer from hunger and poor nutrition. Major changes to food production, processing, and distribution systems are needed to ensure people everywhere have access to safe, sufficient, affordable, and nutritious food.

The transformation of global food systems will rely on the combined expertise, vision, experience, and commitment of researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, and consumers as well as industry practitioners working collectively to catalyze new ideas, drive innovation, and motivate change.  Skills and knowledge from food scientists, nutritionists, engineers, social scientists, manufacturers, and more are needed to foster solution-oriented scientific discoveries to advance our transformative goals.

A hackathon acts as a catalyst to spur innovation, collaboration, and discovery through a highly facilitated event that enables students to design and prototype solutions. 

Join over 150 fellow Cornell undergraduate and graduate students for this weekend's event and develop a broad range of ideas and skills as you address challenges in the hackathon’s focal areas in food innovation and sustainability. Student teams will compete for over $10,000 in prizes (cash and accelerator/incubator opportunities to prototype and ultimately commercialize your project ideas).

Not sure what a food hackathon is? Check out this video about last year's event.

Questions? See The Food Hackathon website and FAQ.

We will begin accepting applications for the 2025 event in mid-August.

Cornell Institute for Food Systems | Website | View More Events

Ami Stuart

Contact the organizers