HAMPDEN, Maine — Officials with Good Shepherd Food Bank of Maine touted the benefits of their new 40,000-square-foot facility in Hampden on Thursday, saying it will ensure more fresh vegetables make it to the tables of the region’s food insecure.
“The healthy food will help the many, many low-income families living with chronic illnesses related to poor diet,” said Executive Director Kristen Miale.
The facility at 11 Penobscot Meadow Drive in Hampden will replace Good Shepherd’s 7,400-square-foot warehouse in Brewer. During an open house at the Hampden facility on Thursday, Miale described the leased facility in Brewer as “woefully inadequate.”
The larger Hampden facility is expected to provide additional cold-storage space for perishable items such as fresh produce, meat and dairy products as Good Shepherd increases its emphasis on nutrition.
“We know that hunger contributes to poor health as families frequently face the trade-off at the grocery store between nutrition and affordability,” Miale said. “This is not acceptable.”
Purchased last month from Bangor Publishing Co., owner of the Bangor Daily News, the facility is a former printing plant that closed in 2013 as the company contracted out the majority of its printing to Sun Media Group, owner of the Sun Journal in Lewiston.
According to Miale, the facility will serve Aroostook, Penobscot, Piscataquis, Hancock and Washington counties, which have the highest rates of hunger in the state. In Washington County alone, the food insecurity rate is 17.6 percent, and the childhood hunger rate is 28 percent, she said.
Good Shepherd plans to retrofit the former printing plant with modular refrigeration units. The food bank is tentatively slated to begin operations in Hampden in January 2016.
Headquartered in Auburn, Good Shepherd Food Bank is the state’s largest charitable hunger relief organization. It distributes food to more than 400 partner agencies across the state, including food pantries, meal sites, schools and senior programs.
Asked about the new facility, Rich Romero, co-manager of the Brewer Area Food Pantry, said Thursday that getting fresh vegetables to the food insecure has been a challenge in the winter months due to lack of storage.
Providing those healthy options that are often more expensive is essential, he said.
“If people are having a challenge putting food on their table, they’re not looking for nutritious foods, because they’re looking for what they can afford, which is the high calorie, the high carbs, which actually has health implications,” he said.
For local farmers, the larger facility could mean more of their vegetables will go to the tables of hungry Mainers.
Lakeside Family Farm in Newport is a 200-acre vegetable farm that sells to 30 Hannaford Supermarkets in Maine.
It is also a partner in Good Shepherd’s Mainers Feeding Mainers program through which Good Shepherd uses fundraising dollars to purchase healthy food from local farmers for distribution throughout its network.
According to Sarah Redfield, one of the farm’s owners, they could be sending more food to Good Shepherd if it had the capacity. Vegetables that aren’t used end up feeding pigs instead of people, she said.
“Right now, we deliver to Brewer once a week, and that’s what they can handle, so we deliver whatever they tell us their max is for the week,” Redfield said. “But we could deliver more.”
Miale said Mainers Feeding Mainers will expand in the new facility. Good Shepherd officials have acknowledged the Hampden facility exceeds their initial space needs. When it opens in January, they are expected to occupy only 10,000 to 12,000 square feet of the building.
Good Shepherd officials are considering a range of options for the remaining space that could help generate revenue for the organization. Those include partnering with another organization to create a regional food hub or leasing out storage space for use by other food distributors.
“We have a lot of ideas that we’re talking about now that we’re in the building and we can actually get architects in here and looking at plans to figure out are the options we can use for this space,” Miale said Thursday.
A food hub is a business or organization that provides resources like warehouse space, trucking and marketing that enable local farmers to better compete with large food wholesalers.
Follow Evan Belanger on Twitter at @evanbelanger.