BUILDING FOR
OUR FUTURE
OUR FUTURE
Food Bank of the Rockies invites you to partner with us as we pursue our ambitious goal:
providing our communities with enough nutritious and familiar food to thrive.
A new Denver Metro distribution center is integral to achieving this goal.
BETTER FOOD
Years ago, people equated the term “food bank” with a warehouse full of leftover soda, canned soup, and crackers—sugar and sodium that could sit on a shelf forever. We’ve helped change that. Our goal isn’t simply to distribute as much food as possible—it’s to nourish people with fresh produce, to offer meals that reflect a community’s cultural heritage, and to meet the needs of growing children and aging adults.
That work will be much easier to accomplish in a new facility. Our current kitchen is tiny, just large enough to hold three employees and six volunteers who can do little more than reheat food, prepare sandwiches, and slice vegetables.
Our new 7,400-square-foot kitchen will allow seven staff and 20 volunteers to collaborate, preparing meals and, when possible, cooking from scratch while offering culinary training that
can make the difference between a job and a career. More room, more help, and more modern equipment translates to better meals.
We’re already looking to raise the bar in the following ways:
- Offering a new “order ahead” meal program that allows people to select food item by item, once we’ve acquired more storage and initiated more frequent food deliveries.
- Expanding our healthcare partnership program, which offers nutritious food for community members with medical conditions including diabetes and hypertension.
- Introducing innovative approaches that are already redefining best practices in food banks across the country.
“We have now stretched the limits of how far this kitchen can go, down to simple square footage. The new facility is going to give us the ability to expand how many children we can reach, but also we will have a lot more up-to-date equipment that will allow us to do more fun foods and a lot more from scratch. We’re finding that children are responding to cleaner, fresher ingredients—because they know it tastes good. We’re giving them foods they may have not known about before, and then we can get children to maybe step away from eating just chicken nuggets or processed food, and make healthier choices growing up. Ideally, in the end, hopefully we’ve made healthier adults.”
– JON KNIGHT, EXECUTIVE CHEF AND DIRECTOR OF CULINARY OPERATIONS