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With current facility 'pushed to extremes,' Tulsa Food Bank plans to double its capacity

Michael Overall Oct 12, 2021 Updated 2 hrs ago

Fifteen years ago, Tulsa’s Community Food Bank opened a distribution center that was designed to handle 20 million pounds of food per year, or nearly three times more than the organization was giving away at the time. It seemed to have plenty of room for growth.

Last year, however, the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma distributed 32.7 million pounds of food, well beyond the facility’s designed limits. The “room for growth” was already being “pushed to extremes,” officials said.

Now the Food Bank is going public with a $28 million fundraising effort to double the distribution center’s capacity, officials told the Tulsa World on Monday. With significant donations already secured, construction could start as soon as November north of downtown Tulsa, officials said.

“After 40 years fighting hunger in eastern Oklahoma,” said Mercedes Millberry Fowler, the board president, “our Food Bank is set to embark on a transformational journey as we enlarge our campus and broaden our purpose.”

Square footage will increase only 75%, but clever design will allow the space to be used more efficiently and give the Food Bank’s output an even bigger boost, officials said. The growth will focus especially on prepared meals as the culinary center will nearly quadruple in size and receive commercial-grade kitchen equipment to increase capacity from 11,000 to 40,000 meals per week.

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The Food Bank started as a tiny offshoot of Neighbor for Neighbor in 1981, when it provided just 90,000 pounds of shelf-stable products to 25 different partner agencies. Now, more than 300 partner agencies rely on the Food Bank as the backbone of food distribution across eastern Oklahoma, making it one of the largest, private hunger-relief organizations in the state.

“Over the last 40 years of service, our Food Bank has earned a central position in the community,” said Chief Advancement Officer Rochelle Dowdell. “We are eager to imagine what our work will look like through the next forty years.”