Our History

Anabel’s Grocery was first conceived in 2014 by Matt Stefanko ‘16 and Emma Johnston ‘16, who were both in the Undergraduate Student Assembly. These students were alarmed by the number of their peers who were eating less than they wanted due to financial, resource, or transportation constraints. Matt and Emma researched the issue of food insecurity on college campuses at a time when this topic was seldom discussed, and spoke to members of the Cornell administration about how widespread food insecurity was at Cornell. Soon after these preliminary discussions, the University added questions to the undergraduate PULSE survey (now the Cornell Undergraduate Experience Survey) to gather data about food access on campus.

Data from the PULSE survey helped students advocate for their novel idea to develop an on-campus grocery store that provided fresh and affordable food to students of all financial backgrounds.

After several conversations with staff at Anabel Taylor Hall, the former space of the Durland Alternatives Library on the first floor was chosen as a suitable venue for the new store. Executive Director of the Center for Transformative Action (CTA), Anke Wessels, proposed that the store become a nonprofit project under CTA, which would allow undergraduate students to focus on growing the store while CTA handled all legal and fiduciary tasks such as holding the grocery store license and doing bookkeeping, insurance, and payroll. Upon gaining approval by the CTA board of directors, Anabel’s Grocery became an official project under CTA!

Cornell President Elizabeth Garrett approved (and President David Skorton later confirmed) the Undergraduate Student Assembly's November 2015 decision to transfer $320,000 from its Students Helping Students Fund to support the costs of store construction, seed funding for our subsidy fund, and start-up expenses. Cornell Dining contributed funds to cover renovation expenses that exceeded the original budget, and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly passed a resolution to allocate four years of additional funds for our subsidy fund.

The store had a brief soft launch during finals week in May 2017 and was fully open in Fall 2017. We briefly closed in Spring 2019, using our course (AEM 3385: Social Entrepreneurship Practicum: Anabel’s Grocery) to conduct a survey and several focus groups to better understand the food needs of students and to reconceive our store’s structure. That semester, we developed our current governance model with four committees, established foundational values about the products we carry, and developed a business model that relies on purchasing some products in bulk, buying from local vendors as much as possible, and using our subsidy fund to keep prices low.

Though we experienced periodic closures and experimented with an online ordering system in the following months due to COVID-19, we resumed in-store shopping in Fall 2021 and have been growing our lovely Anabel’s community ever since.