I wish them all the best at their new address.
The giant “End Hunger” message emblazoned in green on the Houston Food Bank building just north of downtown will soon go away as the charitable organization plans to start cooking hot meals for hungry kids at a larger kitchen under construction inside its east Houston warehouse by 2017.
“It’s been nice,” Food Bank president Brian Greene said. “It’s in a nice prominent spot on I-45, but functionally, we’ve outgrown it, and it’s really limited how many children’s meals we can do.”
The operation of the Mary Barden Keegan Center at 2445 North Freeway will move to a new 10,000-square-foot kitchen inside 535 Portwall 6 miles east of downtown.
Relocating the kitchen will enable the Food Bank to increase its capacity fivefold, to 20,000 meals a day. The new kitchen will be able to accommodate up to 80 volunteers at a time. The kitchen is used to produce meals distributed to 70 after-school and summer program sites for the Kids Cafe.
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Greene sees the new kitchen as another opportunity to make the headquarters a place that volunteers from companies, churches and other groups want to be.
The food bank moved to the Portwall facility, off Interstate 10 East just inside east Loop 610, in 2010 after buying and renovating the former Sysco Distribution Center. The property consists of a 272,711-square-foot warehouse, a 153,341-square-foot freezer building and a 15,870-square-foot truck center.
The facility was built out with about 40,000 square feet of space for volunteers to make the food ready for distribution through some 600 charities in 18 Southeast Texas counties. It’s also designed to be fun, with a choice of music piped in to work areas. It includes conference space for companies to host meetings.
“Volunteers do the vast majority of the actual work here,” Greene said. “Making this a place where people want to come is a big deal for us.”
“We’ll lose the I-45 frontage, but I think we’ll actually gain far more in people actually engaging with us to come to work.”
I’ve been to the new facility, and while it’s not as easily accessible it is a whole lot bigger and should serve the Food Bank’s needs well into the future. Give it a visit, and volunteer some time if you can. They do great work and they need all the help we can give them.