Food Gets a Bigger Bank
By Bill Lilley, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio
Nov. 1–Dan Flowers shows up to work each morning believing he’s still in a dream.
That’s what tripling the size of the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank’s headquarters has done for its president and chief executive.
After 17 years in the cramped Grant Street building that was formerly the Flaherty Potato Chip factory in Akron, the food bank has moved into the spacious former home of beer distributor House of LaRose, also in Akron.
The old building had 27,000 square feet available for receiving donated surplus food, warehousing it and then distributing it to the 340 agencies the food bank serves in Summit, Stark, Tuscarawas, Wayne, Medina, Portage, Holmes and Carroll counties.
The new building at 350 Opportunity Parkway has 85,000 square feet.
But that’s just the beginning.
Flowers said the transition from receiving, storing and distributing beer, which needed to be kept cold, to receiving, storing and distributing perishable food was seamless.
“This building was absolutely perfect because it incorporates more design perfect for storage and distribution than any other food bank in this part of the country,” Flowers said.
“We’re still experiencing the building, but we’re already running additional products and processing a lot more food.”
The 4,000-square-foot refrigerated room is adjacent to the loading dock.
The freezer capacity of 4,000 square feet is four times what the food bank had in its previous facility. The Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank, one of 213 food banks affiliated with America’s Second Harvest, had the freezer brought in.
“You couldn’t have designed the building any better than this, even if that’s what you had started out to do,” operations manager Chuck Allen said. “The whole design of the building is for rapid distribution.”
The facility itself also helps send a powerful message.
“The size and scope of this building conveys the size of the problem we’re trying to solve — hunger in the world,” Flowers said. “We used to move our entire inventory in 15 to 18 days. Now, we can do it more efficiently and that puts more food in the hands of more people.”
Flowers said the new facility enables his site to become a “larger midsize food bank.”
The biggest food banks are a 300,000-square-foot renovated building in New York City and a new 250,000-square-foot building in Chicago.
Working conditions for the food bank’s 27 staff members and hundreds of volunteers have also improved since the new location opened Oct. 16.
“It’s great because now we don’t have office workers dodging forklift trucks trying to get to a copying machine,” said Director of Development Josie McElroy.
Flowers said the trend nationally is to build facilities. A new 110,000-square-foot facility in Cleveland that opened in 2003 cost $11 million. But Flowers said moving into an existing building saved the local food bank about $1 million.
Flowers said the total cost will be around $6 million. The Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank paid $2.5 million for the building, which had stood empty since House of LaRose moved in 2004. Flowers estimates $2 million will be spent in improvements, which began six months ago. The other $1.5 million will go toward new equipment.
The organization has set a fundraising goal of $8 million. The Hard Hats & High Heels fundraiser scheduled for 6 p.m. Saturday still has a few openings available.
“It’s a great value to the community,” Flowers said. “Because of this new facility and all it has to offer, we have the potential to increase our annual distribution to 16 million pounds a year over the next 10 years.”
McElroy said the food bank distributes between 40,000 and 80,000 pounds of food each weekday. It distributed 11.3 million pounds of food in 2006 and is on pace to distribute 12.5 million pounds in 2007.
That puts Flowers in a good frame of mind each night to expand his dreams.
Bill Lilley can be reached at 330-996-3811 or blilley@thebeaconjournal.com.
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