General contractor David Pearce believes the food pantry portion of the new Statesboro Food Bank can be completed by August. But the food bank’s Executive Director Sheila Stewart-Leach notes that completing the front of the building and buying and installing equipment toward a grand opening will take into the fall at least.

To a question from the Statesboro Herald, she also answered that about $500,000 in donations or other funding is still needed toward the overall $2.1 million projected cost.

Meanwhile, Stewart-Leach and nonprofit Food Bank Inc. board President Johnny Tremble, who is also a member of the Rebecca’s Café board, reported that Rebecca’s Café, the all-volunteer charity that once served weekly hot meals from space shared with the food bank at the old Julia P. Bryant School, plans to cease operations at the end of April and recombine efforts with the food bank going forward. For many months now, Rebecca’s Café has operated from the grounds of First Presbyterian Church, recently serving bag lunches on Wednesdays.

Those were points of information shared when several of Bulloch County’s elected commissioners, a few county staff members and a reporter were given a tour Tuesday of the 12,000-square-foot food bank facility, now in interior stages of construction, on Miller Street between Northside Drive West and West Parrish Street.

Back in 2021 and early 2022, the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners and Statesboro City Council together committed $500,000 each, a total of $1 million, from their pandemic-era federal funding under the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, to build a permanent home for Statesboro Food Bank.

“We would not have been able to do anything without the county’s participation with the half million dollars that you gave us, as really the foundation for our fund-raising, and of course the city’s half million dollars,” Stewart-Leach said near the end of Tuesday’s tour.

“I want you to  know that it  is going  to a public  purpose, and a public purpose that is compassionate  and takes away some despair of those who are going through hard times, because good people do  go through bad things.”

In July 2022, Food Bank Inc. spent $240,000 to buy the 3.75-acre site. Wesley Parker of Parker Engineering has served as consulting engineer and Frank D’Arcangelo of DPR Architecture as consulting architect. Pearce Building Systems contracted to build the building for costs that Stewart-Leach said are now a little over $1.5 million. But that did not include the land purchase, engineering and other non-building expenses.

It has a concrete floor and steel exterior walls and roof. Now the interior walls are up. Much remains to be done, but those taking the tour were able to see the layout without needing to use too much imagination.

The front room behind the porch will have two client service desks. To the left, the large classroom will have a retractable middle wall so that it can be used as two classrooms, one of which will be equipped for cooking demonstrations.

Meals 7 days a week

To the right is the dining hall and the room that will be equipped as a larger commercial kitchen. A fire marshal told Stewart-Leach the dining room could accommodate up to 83 people, she said, but she thinks it might more realistically seat about 60 or 70. So if more people need lunch, the food bank might serve lunch twice in a day, for two seatings, she added.

She also plans to provide “super simple” breakfasts, such as fried egg sandwiches with coffee and juice, and to serve hot meals much more often than the once or twice a week that was done in the past.

“The  dining hall will be open seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Stewart-Leach said. “When people are hungry, they’re hungry every day, so we will be  hiring a person to cook and run the space, and then they will have an assistant to work on weekends and that kind of thing.”

Still on Morgan Way

For now, Food Bank Inc. is continuing to provide only its “meal-box” program from the temporary, leased location at 1545 Morgan Way where it  moved in September.

“Over the last almost-decade, the only program that the food bank has provided has been a meal-box program,” she said. “What that means is, a family can sign up and they can pick up a weekly meal box that’s basically their groceries for the week.”

To qualify, families have to fill out forms providing information on the number of people in the household, their ages and income. Statesboro Food Bank has rejoined Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia, the Savannah-based regional food bank, and must comply with U.S.  Department of Agriculture regulations to receive the deeply discounted USDA staple foods.

With the new building, Statesboro  Food Bank leaders plan to expand its mission to include the hot  meals and nutrition and food  preparation classes, but these  will have to wait until the facility is fully equipped and more staff added.

The dining hall, kitchen, a small pantry for the dining hall, the classrooms and several offices make up the public  portion of the building, encompassing  about 5,500  square feet.

Brannon Pantry

The larger portion, measuring about 6,500 square feet, is actually the food-storage area, or pantry, in back, and it  has a special  name.

“This is the Brannon Pantry, named in honor of Joe Bill Brannon,” she said.

In addition to dry storage, plans call for the pantry to be equipped with 22 upright, commercial-type freezers and refrigerators – 11 of each, in back-to-back pairs. Additionally, there will be a walk-in freezer and a walk-in cooler for fresh produce.

The pantry will also include a men’s bathroom and a women’s bathroom, both with showers, plus a laundry area with a washer and drier. These, and backup generators and buried communications lines, help equip the food bank as a “crisis response” facility. Volunteers or Food Bank personnel could potentially work overnight to receive food shipments and organize distributions in response to a community food crisis, such as the aftermath of a storm.

Both David Pearce and his company’s superintendent on the project, Bo Fordham, were along for the tour. The reporter asked when the facility is now expected to be in operation.

“We’re going to try to have the pantry over here as soon as possible,” Pearce said. “I would think it would be done by August. I hope to be done even sooner.”

But moving foodstuffs into the new storage area could still leave a number of other things to be done before a grand opening later in the fall, added Stewart-Leach, who said she really isn’t predicting an opening date at this point.

She said the Food Bank has recently submitted applications through Georgia’s two U.S.  senators – Sen. Raphael Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff – for a federal grant of almost $700,000 primarily for building a pavilion, on the grounds outside the main building, that could also be used for emergency food distribution. About $100,000 of the sought-after grant, she said, would be for equipment in the main building related to food emergencies.

County Manager Tom Couch said that the county staff is also “trying to cobble up some additional ARPA money” toward the project and hopes to be able to announce “some kind of pledge through the ARPA budget” in a couple of weeks.