Public is invited to tour Feeding the Valley Food Bank’s new home

Frank Sheppard is so close to the finish line that he can taste it. The executive director of Feeding the Valley Food Bank in Columbus is wrapping up a few loose ends on a brand new facility, even as he prepares to host an open house on Friday.

“It’s still a work in progress,” Sheppard said Wednesday. “The transition will probably be complete by the end of next week. We will continue to operate out of Coca-Cola Boulevard until we can get all of the electronics — the network and systems and so forth —transferred from one to the other.”

(Feeding the Valley in home stretch for opening new center, helping more people)

(Help feed the valley on April 1 with a healthy 5K and fun run)

That would be the 5928 Coca-Cola Blvd. location that the nonprofit organization has used for its regional food distribution efforts for years. The new $3.5 million facility at 6744 Flat Rock Road, is just a few minutes away.

Those who attend the 9:30 a.m. grand opening on Friday will still get an up-close look at a 31,000-square-foot warehouse that aims to serve the Chattahoochee Valley and the surrounding area for the next several decades. A brief ceremony will be followed by guided tours, with the gathering open to the general public.

“It’s almost hard to believe that we’re at this point,” Sheppard said of the new facility’s debut. “This (capital funding) campaign has gone on for almost four years from the start, and this great food bank facility has always been off in the future, off in the future. Well now it’s here. It has been very emotional to get to this point and to see that beautiful facility complete and realize how much more we’re going to be able to do to help the community with this additional capacity.”

Feeding the Valley serves about 40,000 people in a 14-county area in west-central Georgia, as well as Russell County in Alabama. The Georgia counties are Chattahoochee, Clay, Harris, Marion, Meriwether, Muscogee, Quitman, Randolph, Schley, Stewart, Talbot, Troup, Schley, Stewart and Webster. Aside from food distribution, it also operates a Kids Café hot meal program.

The food bank supplies 270 partner agencies in the region, which encompasses a population of about 430,000. The estimated total number of people considered “chronically hungry” in the coverage area is more than 80,000, Sheppard said, thus the need for a bigger, better facility.

While the new distribution center is only about 8,000-square-feet larger than the old one, it will have capacity to deliver double the overall goods to the needy than it now does because of its higher 30-foot ceilings. The freezer and refrigerator space will be four times that of the current facility.

Feeding the Valley, which has 20 full-time and eight part-time employees, distributed just over 8 million pounds of food in its last fiscal year that ended in June, which was an all-time record. That number is expected to reach 10 million pounds within five years and 17 million pounds within a decade at the new location, serving more than 55,000 people.

If and when the food bank eclipses that total amount of distributed food, Sheppard said a plan already is place.

“We have designed the facility and purchased enough land so we could put on a Phase 2, 10,000-square-foot expansion just as the property is laid out now, simply by knocking out one wall and extending it farther out,” he said.

The current project is being funded through a $4.7 million capital fund-raising campaign, of which $4,350,000 is already in hand, Sheppard said. That leaves about $350,000 to go, with an anonymous challenge grant of $450,000 expected to be completed by June 30.

“So we’re pretty close and certainly think by the end of June we’ll have that wrapped up,” he said.

The Coca-Cola Boulevard location already is up for sale, which should be a nice financial boost for the food bank when it sells. A real-estate website shows the 22,793-square-foot building built in 2001 is on the market for $699,000. Aside from a large warehouse area, it includes a commercial kitchen and office space and is just off Gateway Road and Manchester Expressway (U.S. Highway 27).

Grand opening festivities for the new distribution center include an OutRun Hunger 5k and fun run that starts and finishes Saturday morning at the Jamesson Road facility.

This story was originally published March 29, 2017 at 5:30 PM with the headline "Public is invited to tour Feeding the Valley Food Bank’s new home."