Foodbank touts new digs at open house

October 23, 2009

BRATTLEBORO -- The Vermont Foodbank showed off its new Brattleboro Distribution Center at an open house Thursday, filled with hope and the promise of many years of better serving the community to come.

Community members like Gina Goff, director of corporate giving for C&S Wholesale Grocers, expressed their delight in seeing the project finally come to fruition.

"The new Vermont Foodbank branch has the power and the potential to be a catalyst for change," Goff said.

The distribution center will provide space for the food the Foodbank receives from donors like C&S -- space that has never existed before in southern Vermont.

The 21,000-square-foot facility, at Browne Court, is "zero waste," which means composting and recycling will be regular practices, and the giant walk-in freezer and cooler will take in and use the freezing outside air during the winter months.

The location of the new center is ideal as well, said Judy Stermer, Vermont Foodbank director of communications and public affairs.

"We now have a facility right off the highway, which is easier for large donors," she said.

"It's also ideally located for the community, being so close to Brattleboro," she added.

The convenient location opens the facility up to other, new possibilities; the Foodbank revealed blueprints of a community kitchen that is not yet built, but will hopefully receive funding within the next couple of years.

The community kitchen program is funded by the Department of Labor and Next Generation grants, Stermer said. The program trains unemployed or underemployed adults in culinary skills.

A relatively new idea in Vermont, the program has produced two classes of graduates from the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf in Burlington.

The classes are made possible through the Foodbank's partnership with the Vermont Department of Labor and Vermont Works, and the majority of people who graduate from the 14-week program use their new skills to better their lives in various different ways.

"About half of the graduates from Burlington went on to pursue further education, and a number of them took jobs at Sodexo (Inc., a leading food service company)," said John Sayles, chief executive officer of the Vermont Foodbank.

But the most immediate benefit to the community that the new distribution center will provide is a more efficient way to make food accessible to those in need in southern Vermont.

The 55 network partners that rely on the Foodbank for a large percentage of the food they distribute will be able to stop by the center as frequently as they need to, rather than relying on a monthly food delivery.

Often, said Stermer, those deliveries needed to be trucked up Interstate 91 from Connecticut or Massachusetts. Now southern Vermont can serve its communities much more easily, with some help from local volunteers.

Elina Frumkin, Vermont Foodbank field representative for the gleaning program, said the new branch will improve the program, which is also new this year, for years to come.

"The gleaning project takes surplus, unmarketable produce and delivers it to our network partners," Frumkin explained.

The gleaning project has more than 90 volunteers in Southern Vermont; when a farm has extra produce sitting in the field that it can't sell, volunteers get notices about where and when to show up to gather the food.

It used to be that extra food had to be delivered right away because there was no room to store it, Frumkin said, but now that food can be kept in the center's coolers for days if need be.

October 23, 2009

Press Room