Food Executive ProgramImmersion Experience

Becky Smith is the Vice President of the Digital Merchandising and Catalog Operations at Shipt, responsible for creating an industry-leading Marketplace experience for Shipt Members and customers. She oversees the distinctly Shipt experience, while managing the priorities and integration of over 130 Retailers and over 50 CPG Partners on Shipt Marketplace.

Becky has over 20 years of career experience at Fortune 500 industry leaders including Best Buy, Sears and Target. After a decade in Merchandise Buying incubating new businesses and driving growth in large strategic categories for Best Buy, she has honed her craft with specialization in E-commerce Merchandising. Acting as a change agent, Becky has created and defined Digital Merchandising teams and related strategies within established organizations.

At Target, Becky played a pivotal role in launching Grocery and Essentials categories in E-commerce, driving growth and profit optimization. This leadership led to the role of Program lead for the first specialized service, Restock, a next day delivery service. She has brought innovative solutions launching multiple CPG, Direct to customer and Private label brands over her career. Within the ever evolving Digital world, she has modernized experiences through business, technology and creative solutions.

Becky has led cultural change in Wellness elevating food and personal care item quality standards and curation. In addition, she championed body inclusivity and model diversity merchandising in both beauty and apparel. Today, Becky remains active in driving Women leadership impact, as the Executive Sponsor of the Women’s Employee Resource Group, empoWered, at Shipt.

Becky received a Bachelor’s degree from the University Minnesota, with focuses in Marketing and Sociology. She and her husband continue to reside in Minnesota with their two active children. When they are not driving to rehearsals or tournaments, they are avid Gopher fans who enjoy food exploration, travel, golf and skiing as a family.

As Vice President of Industry & Customer Engagement, Joe is responsible for linking the customer’s needs with Kellogg strategies and initiatives across all trade channels. This includes the development and implementation of strategies designed to maximize industry collaboration and strategic partnerships.

Joe joined Kellogg’s in 1992 and has 30 years of experience in the CPG business with experience across small, medium and big box retailers along with experience with sales agencies across the store including grocery, HBC, front‐end, frozen and home goods. And also includes leading the Kellogg entry into the HBC section of the store.

In his current role, he will work with strategic working committees and engage closely with FMI, FMI Educational Foundation, California Grocers Association, National Frozen and Refrigerated Association, Expo West, National Grocers Association, Grocery Manufacturer Association, Western Association of Food Chains, Candy Show, National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Saint Joseph’s and Western Michigan Universities Food Marketing programs.

Mr. Mueller received a bachelor’s degree from Missouri State University and a master’s degree from the University of Phoenix. Mr. Mueller was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He and his wife, Nancy reside in Bentonville, Arkansas. They have three children.

Gordon Reid serves as President of Stop & Shop, a great local brand of Ahold Delhaize USA. Founded in 1914, Stop & Shop now has more than 400 stores across the Northeast and employs nearly 54,000 associates.

Prior to joining Stop & Shop in 2019, Gordon Reid served as President of Giant Food and led the brand to the number one market share position in each of its local markets. Under his leadership, the company made healthy eating easier and affordable, while also growing home delivery and transforming the shopping experience with the customer top of mind.

Reid has more than 35 years of international retail experience. Before joining Giant Food, he worked as CEO of China and Deputy Regional Director of North Asia for The Dairy Farm Group in Hong Kong. Previously, he spent time at Tesco in various leadership roles and worked in a variety of countries such as Hungary, India and China. He also previously worked at Boots in the United Kingdom for 15 years, where he held general management roles, and at A.S. Watson Group spending time in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. He started his career as a pharmacist in 1984.

Reid holds a bachelor’s of science in pharmacy from Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, U.K., and a Master’s of Business Administration from Nottingham University Business School in the U.K. He serves on the Board of Directors at the Greater Boston Food Bank and Partnership for a Healthier America. Reid also serves on the National Academy of Sciences’ Roundtable for Obesity Solutions representing Stop & Shop, which was the first-ever grocery retailer to join this group in their work to address the obesity crisis. Gordon and his wife reside in Boston, Mass.

With more than 40 years of industry experience, Ross Purdy joined the Food City team in 2015 as Vice President of Center Store Operations. The company operates 150 retail locations spanning southeastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, north Georgia, and Alabama. The chain includes 131 Food City supermarkets (with 119 pharmacies and 116 fuel/convenience stores), 5 Fresh n’ Low and 1 Cooke’s Food Store & Pharmacy locations, 4 Super Dollar Food Center limited assortment stores, 4 wine & spirits stores, and 5 Curt’s Ace Hardware stores. The company is ranked #50 in sales among US Food retailers.

Purdy is responsible for the oversight of all center store operations, supervision of the category management staff, space management, procurement, grocery supervisors and coordination of the consumer product goods partners. Prior to joining the Food City team, Purdy served in a number of positions for Daymon Worldwide, including Vice President and other key management roles relating to the company’s international, diverting, and import divisions. During his tenure, he gained a great deal of knowledge and experience in grocery, wholesale, mass, and dollar channels. Purdy also served eleven years with Kraft Foods and worked in store operations for Houchens Markets prior to that.

Purdy holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business from Western Kentucky University. He also completed Harvard’s General Management Program.

Ken Blanchard, one of the most influential leadership experts in the world, is the co-author of the iconic best sellers “The One Minute Manager” and “The New One Minute Manager,” as well as 65 other books whose combined sales total more than 23 million copies. His groundbreaking works have been translated into more than 47 languages. In 2005 he was inducted into Amazon’s Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 best-selling authors of all time.
He is the co-founder, with his wife, Margie, of The Ken Blanchard Companies®, an international management training and consulting firm in San Diego, California. He also co-founded Lead Like Jesus, a worldwide organization committed to helping people become servant leaders.

Ken has received numerous awards and honors for his contributions in the fields of management, leadership, and speaking. The National Speakers Association awarded him its highest honor, the Council of Peers Award of Excellence. He was inducted into the HRD Hall of Fame by Training magazine and he received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International. Ken also received the Thought Leadership Award from ISA – The Association of Learning Providers.
When he’s not writing or speaking, Ken teaches students in the Master of Science in Executive Leadership Program at the University of San Diego. Born in New Jersey and raised in New York, Ken received an M.A. degree from Colgate University and a B.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Roni Proter is an award-winning TV and internet personality and chef. Her website, Dinner Reinvented, addresses the challenge busy families face preparing delicious meals. For nearly two decades she has been a regular contributor on morning shows and TV stations nationwide, sharing recipes and tips to help busy families get weeknight meals on the table effortlessly. Her research interests include food trends by generation and how social media is influencing culinary trends. She works with a variety of consumer and food brands to help reach their target markets through recipes and video creation across a variety of media platforms.

Roni graduated from Texas State University with a degree in journalism and communications, and began her career as a television reporter covering news, lifestyle and entertainment before attending culinary school. Afterward, she returned to television to combine both of her passions, cooking and video. She shares approachable recipes for dinner and creative uses for leftovers to reduce food waste and utilize all the food we keep in our kitchen from the pantry to the freezer.

Robyn Carter founded Jump Rope Innovation in 2005 with the goal of connecting consumer insights with category trends to inspire meaningful innovation. Today, Robyn and the Jump Rope team are bringing best-in-class innovation strategy to iconic brands around the world, partnering with Unilever, Mondelez, Mars-Wrigley and others. Using engaging hands-on tools and experiential learning, Robyn and her team help cross-functional client teams to build their “gut” for the real people who their brands serve each day, and to translate that understanding into insight-driven innovation.

Robyn is also the co-creator of IT! Factor, a proprietary influencer research platform. This platform leverages the power of social media influencers to identify emerging opportunities in the marketplace before they reach the mainstream. This empowers brands to build leading-edge innovation, creating products and services for the world as it will be, rather than for the world as it exists today.

Before leaving Ogilvy and the world of advertising to forge new frontiers, Robyn’s previous life was spent in both Account Management and New Business, helping to create and implement communications strategy for a series of iconic brands such as Maxwell House, Capri Sun, Kool-Aid and Red Stripe. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York (pre-hipster) and graduated from Cornell University with a BS in Industrial & Labor Relations. She and her husband have five kids of assorted ages, all of whom are foodies. Her claim to fame is having completed three half-marathons with her older daughter, despite having no discernable athletic talent prior to those experiences.

As Managing Partner for Jump Rope Innovation, John helps direct and oversee the business. He works with clients to help them to innovate and market effectively through connecting them with consumers and the marketplace. John focuses on opportunities where he can leverage his extensive marketing and research background to shed new light on consumer and category insights.

John also developed the quantitative piece of the IT! Factor tool, heading up an annual “What’s Hot, What’s Not” quantitative study, and co-creating a new quantitative testing tool called 360 Ideavate, where future-forward innovation ideas that would be missed by traditional methodologies can be identified.

John joined Jump Rope 5 years ago. In his previous life he was most recently Executive Vice President, Consulting at GfK, a global marketing research firm where he ran a team of forty researchers responsible for quantitative research in the innovation area across all industries, including consumer goods, retail, tech, health care and financial services. Prior to that, he was an executive at Ipsos, a global research firm. He spent the first part of his career on the client side at Bestfoods/Unilever. This included various roles in marketing research, a five and a half year assignment in Asia and, upon returning to the US, a VP Marketing position.

John has a BA and an MBA from Rutgers University. Outside of work, John likes to spend time with his family – his wife Robyn, five kids and a dog. He also plays the bass, occasionally with a band, listens to jazz (his father was a jazz pianist) and loves to cook.

Ed McLaughlin is the Robert G. Tobin Professor of Marketing Emeritus at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. He served as interim dean of Dyson from July 2020 to July 2021 and from June 2016 to June 2017. McLaughlin directed Dyson’s undergraduate business program, the largest undergraduate major at Cornell, for 20 years. He also served as the faculty director of the Food Executive Program (now in its 56th year) and directed Cornell’s Food Industry Management Program. He is a distinguished expert in the efficiency of food distribution systems who has worked with food industry companies, trade associations, and public policymakers over many decades.

Daniel Duty is an internationally known expert in the fields of strategic negotiation, strategic partnerships, and coalition building. He is the founder and CEO of Conlego, a firm specializing in these areas for retailers and CPG brands.

Daniel built the Business Partnerships and Negotiations team for Target where he developed its negotiations and partnership strategy and implemented a variety of frameworks, creating billions of dollars in savings and growth.

Daniel has led hundreds of negotiations with companies like Coca Cola, Hasbro, and Levis. He’s developed strategic partnerships creating innovative new products and solutions with organizations like P&G, Starbucks and UNICEF. Daniel built the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a coalition of retailers and manufacturers improving worker safety.

Daniel has taught thousands of businesspeople in the art and science of collaborative negotiations and partnerships at companies, business forums and leading universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, and Northwestern.

Daniel has held leadership positions at Target, the offices of US Senator Paul Simon, the US International Trade Commission, General Mills and other organizations.

Mark Mathews is an operator with expertise in growth strategies, business development, omnichannel retail, merchandising and category management transformation, executive team leadership, storytelling and negotiation.

Mark began his career negotiating property and casualty insurance programs and designing financial risk transfer products for Fortune 100 companies before joining one of his clients – Target Corporation. As the leader of Target’s Risk Management team, Mark was responsible for negotiating litigation settlements and other high stakes insurance claims.

Mark then joined Target’s heralded Business Partnerships & Negotiations team where he was responsible for building matrixed, multi-year partnerships with Target’s largest CPG vendors in food and beverage, including Nestlé, Frito-Lay, Tyson, PepsiCo, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Conagra, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Dean Foods, Danone, Cargill, Unilever and many others. He also led teams through private label manufacturing negotiations using reverse cost engineering. Mark’s last role at Target was senior merchant with P+L ownership for Target’s dairy business.

After Target, Mark held various executive leadership positions in venture-backed startups. As Head of Sales and member of the Executive Leadership Team at Ripple Foods, a high-growth food tech startup with proprietary plant protein technology, Mark was responsible for setting the strategic vision and financial plans for the company, new business, international expansion, consumer and market insights, revenue forecasting and trade expense management. Most recently, Mark founded and led the Merchandising Partnerships and Negotiations team at Gopuff, the first North American eCommerce retailer in the instant delivery space.

Mark has lived retail from every angle, has a knack for seeing possibilities in uncertainty and finds energy coaching organizations that are shaping the future of commerce.

Dan Hooker is a global retail and consumer packaged goods executive with broad experience across diverse business environments and formats, leading traditional food retail operations and merchandising, as well as product development, consumer and category analytics, sourcing and procurement, global trading, national sales, and ecommerce. An outstanding strategist and general manager, he has led the successful startup of multiple diverse businesses. Known for and recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on retailers’ proprietary brands, Mr. Hooker has shaped clients’ programs across four continents and eight classes of trade. His passion is in helping companies recognize their unique DNA and positioning then creating actionable marketing and sales strategies essential for their success.

Lilly Jan is a lecturer of food and beverage at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. She brings nearly 15 years of experience in hospitality and foodservice, having worked in restaurants, catering and events, retail, and television production. Prior to joining Cornell, Dr. Jan was the Director of Culinary Operations for Newbury College in Brookline, Massachusetts. She also served as a faculty member and academic advisor at Newbury College, creating and teaching a range of classes across culinary and hospitality management. Dr, Jan has also taught for Le Cordon Bleu and Boston University.

As a chef, product and recipe developer, and foodservice consultant, Dr. Jan has worked with a variety of food-based businesses, including a food truck, on-demand food delivery, food startup, and retail food stores. She specializes in operations management, focusing on ushering food business concepts to market.

A frequent speaker and media contact on food culture, cooking, and Chinese cuisine, Dr. Jan has been featured in print and radio outlets. She worked on TV production for America’s Test Kitchen and was a regular contributor for WGBH’s Boston Public Radio.

Dr. Jan is a two-time graduate of Boston University in Communications (B.Sc.) and Gastronomy (MLA). She earned her Ph.D. from Iowa State University in hospitality management with a focus on food allergy knowledge and training in ethnic restaurants. Dr. Jan’s research interests include workplace training and education in foodservice, career progression in foodservice, food safety and food allergy in restaurants, and culture and cuisine.

Vishal Gaur is the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean and Emerson Professor of Manufacturing Management at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. Gaur earned his PhD from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (2001), MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (1995), and BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (1993).

As associate dean for MBA programs from 2014 to 2019, Gaur launched the Digital Technology Immersion, in which MBA candidates and students earning their MPS in data science or applied statistics develop skills in coding, databases, and advanced analytics, and learn to leverage them to tackle challenges faced by leading companies.

He also created and served as the program director for the Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program offered through eCornell, which provides working professionals a hands-on opportunity to learn about data analytics tools essential to analyzing and optimizing business decisions.

Gaur’s research focuses on data-driven analysis of problems in supply chains, retailing, e-commerce, and marketplace operations, and his work was recognized with the Wickham Skinner Early Career Research Accomplishments Award from the Production and Operations Management Society in 2006. He served as a department editor for Management Science during 2014-2021, and his current projects involve the reduction of food waste and supply chain risk. He teaches graduate courses in operations management, digital business and retail operations, and data analysis.

Gaur is the 2022 recipient of the Class of 1992 Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2020 recipient of the Stephen Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, and a three-time winner of the Johnson School’s Core Faculty Award, the Cornell-Tsinghua Dual Degree MBA Gravitas Award in 2021, the Johnson Cornell Tech Core Faculty Award by the graduating class of 2017, and honorable mention in the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award Competition in 2001.

Well-known among students for the care and attention he gives to his teaching, he currently teaches the Semester in Strategic Operations MBA immersion course, where students go on site visits and work on client projects in topics such as industry 4.0, traceability, and sales and operations planning.

Before joining Johnson, he was an assistant professor at the NYU Stern School of Business from 2001 to 2007 and a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School from 2007 to 2008.

Miguel I. Gómez is the Robert G. Tobin Associate Professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University. He is Director of the Food Industry Management Program, globally recognized as the premier food industry education and research program. Professor Gómez has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Illinois.

Professor Gómez concentrates his research program on two interrelated areas under the umbrella of food marketing and distribution. The first is Food Value Chain Competitiveness and Sustainability. His work in this area involves multidisciplinary collaborations for the development models to assess supply chain performance in multiple dimensions, including economic, social, and environmental. The second is Food Value Chain Negotiation. Here Professor Gómez combines theory and outreach methods to analyze food markets from farm to table, emphasizing key concepts such as demand response, consumer behavior, buyer/seller negotiations, market power, and retail performance. In addition, his research extends to economic development and environmental economics, examining incentives and barriers of smallholder farmer participation in food value chains and sustainability of food systems, with emphasis in Latin America. Professor Gómez’s applied research efforts aim at enhancing market opportunities for fruit and vegetable products, benefiting producers, food processors/distributors, and consumers worldwide.

Professor Gómez’s work has been published in top journals, including Science, Management Science, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, World Development, and Food Policy. His research program has been funded with over 100 research grants, including the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Professor Gómez has won several prestigious teaching and research awards, including the Rising Star Faculty Award of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. He has consulted for multilateral development institutions such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Interamerican Development Bank.

Dr. Ana C. Krieger is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Departments of Medicine, Neurology, and Genetic Medicine. She holds board certifications in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, and Sleep Medicine, and is a faculty member in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, at Weill Cornell Medical College as well as an Associate Attending at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and at Rockefeller University Hospital.

Over the past 20 years, Dr. Krieger has been actively involved in patient care, training of sleep specialists, and sleep medicine education. Besides her clinical activities, Dr. Krieger works in research projects as a clinician scientist, investigating the mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and thrombosis in sleep apnea, and helping with the development of new technologies for sleep monitoring and education.

Michael J. Hostetler is a faculty member of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Mr. Hostetler’s main research and teaching interests are in strategy, decision-making, leadership, high performance teams, innovation and change management. He has taught classes in the MBA program, Executive MBA program and the Cornell-Queen’s EMBA program, as well as many non-degree executive education programs.

Mr. Hostetler also consults with private and non-profit organizations, both domestically and internationally. In particular, he works frequently in the health care, financial services, manufacturing and food industries. Recent clients include the Lehigh Valley Health Network, the Community Health Foundation of Buffalo, New York, the P2 Collaborative of Western New York, Northern Trust, Schwan’s, LG, United Technologies, Driscoll’s, Philip Morris International, Citigroup, Victaulic Co., Anthony Marano Co., Nunasi Corp., Ahold Delhaize, Sun World International, Samsung, LG, Sony, NACS, United Fresh, Vantage Foods, OSRAM, Baldor, NGA, and SG Cowen. Mr. Hostetler has also designed and taught a number of executive development programs and strategy consulting projects globally, including the U. S., Great Britain, Holland, Canada, France, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Venezuela, Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, India, Dubai, and Egypt.

William Drake recently retired From Cornell, where he was Senior Extension Associate, faculty member, and Director of Executive Education of the Food Industry Management Program (FIMP) in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Bill developed and continues to direct the National Association of Convenience Stores Executive Leadership Program and the National Grocers Association Executive Leadership Program. In addition, he teaches in the Food Executive Program, United Fresh Produce Executive Development Program, and FIMP’s various international food executive programs. Bill has conducted programs for food industry executives from over 30 countries.

Before joining Cornell, Bill was an executive at SuperValu, one of the nation’s largest food retailers and wholesalers. His positions included Vice President of Marketing and Real Estate (Cub Foods); Vice President of Strategic Planning, Key Wholesale Customers (SuperValu corporate); and Vice President of Strategic Planning, Marketing, and Real Estate (Save-A-Lot).

Bill is a founding member of the National Grocers Association University Coalition and also serves on the Boards of Directors of LEADNY; Coborn’s, a large regional multi-format food retailer in the Upper Midwest; and Vantage Foods, a Canadian supplier of case-ready meat to North American retailers.

Adam Brumberg splits his time between consumer behavior research and the food industry management program. He runs student programs, co-teaches “Supply Chain Strategy,” and is an active leader in executive education programs.