Food Bank of the Rockies’ new distribution center will have three-story refrigerators, spaces to break down large donations and a kitchen big enough to eventually quadruple the number of meals going to after-school programs — once the nonprofit can raise the $12 million necessary to finish it.
The food bank already raised the bulk of the $75 million needed to build and outfit the 270,000-square-foot facility, CEO Erin Pulling said. Assuming the remaining fundraising goes well, it will open this winter, she said.
The organization bought land in a warehouse complex just south of Denver’s Green Valley Ranch neighborhood more than two years ago, but the timing is proving apt as demand for help affording food is about to increase, Pulling said.
The tax bill Congress passed last week will extend work requirements for food assistance dollars to people between 55 and 64, and advocates fear some will lose eligibility because they can’t navigate the paperwork. At the same time, food banks are losing federal funding that allows them to buy produce from local farmers.
“It drives home the need for this building,” Pulling said during a media tour Wednesday.
Last year, Food Bank of the Rockies, which has a roughly $173 million budget, provided food for about 417,000 people in Colorado and Wyoming. Most of it reached people in need indirectly, through other organizations that distribute food to their clients.
The organization also offers mobile food pantries in high-need areas, meals for programs serving children and food delivery for low-income older adults. It received about $23 million in government grants, with most of the rest of its funding listed as public contributions.
The food bank outgrew its main distribution center near Interstate 70 and Havana Street about 14 years ago and leases a second center and an offsite parking area for its trucks, Pulling said. While the new building has significant upfront costs, the organization will save about $500,000 on operations annually, allowing it to put more money into purchasing food to give out to its partners, she said.
The larger facility will also allow the food bank to accept some types of donated food that it can’t handle now, said Steve Kullberg, the project manager.
For example, the current centers can’t take produce sitting on ice because the meltwater would create a hazard, but a new space with drains on the floor will allow the organization to accept that food. Increased space for volunteers to work also will make it feasible to take a 2,000-pound pallet of produce and break it down into two-pound packages that families can use, he said.
“That would be very much in demand” among food bank clients, he said.
The new building’s kitchen also will have about four times the space the food bank currently uses for cooking and packaging meals, executive chef Jon Knight said.
As is, staff and volunteers can produce about 2,400 meals a day for children in after-school programs around the Denver area, with about one-quarter of the food cooked from scratch, he said. The food bank distributes the equivalent of about 208,000 meals per day, but the vast majority go out as food that clients can pick up and prepare themselves, rather than pre-made meals.
Once everything is online, Knight hopes to gradually increase that to 10,000 meals a day, with up to three-quarters of the items from scratch. The food bank could eventually partner with other types of organizations offering free meals, but, for now, it will focus on serving more kids’ programs, he said.
The refrigerator serving the kitchen will be able to hold up to 48 pallets of food, up from four in the current facility, Knight said. Forty-eight pallets would fill one and a half standard tractor-trailers.
The new facility will also have a separate room where volunteers can take the recently prepared food and build meal trays, he said.
“That (packaging) room is bigger than my whole kitchen now,” he said.
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