Nearly a year to the day since it formally broke ground on the project, Feed More is fully moved into its new digs in Henrico County.
The nonprofit is now operating out of its newly built distribution warehouse at 8020 Villa Park Drive near St. Joseph’s Villa.
The $40 million, 124,000-square-foot warehouse is nearly 40% larger than the old tobacco warehouses on Rhoadmiller Street near The Diamond it called home for over 20 years. That 6-acre property in the city, visible from the interstate, is under contract to be sold for a condominium development.
On top of the additional space, the new facility has five times more freezer capacity and doubles the size of its commercial kitchen. Feed More had kept its Rhoadmiller kitchen operational through the project and, as of today (Monday), it is now cooking completely at the new warehouse.
Feed More CEO Doug Pick outside the food bank’s former home on Rhoadmiller Street in Richmond. (BizSense file photo)
“Not a single meal has been missed through all of this,” said Doug Pick, Feed More’s CEO, on a tour of the new building.
“It is a nice building. It’s a functional building,” he said. “It’s not overly nice. It’s what we needed to enhance our mission.”
The bigger facility accommodates Feed More’s prepping of as many as 15,000 meals weekly. The nonprofit employs 100 full-time workers and uses more than 200 volunteers daily for programs that include its Meals on Wheels deliveries for seniors and people with disabilities. Feed More collects, prepares and distributes 40 million pounds of food annually.
Designed by Baskervill and built by Hourigan, the new building features a two-story entrance and reception area that leads to upstairs offices and ground-floor rooms for donations and volunteer sign-ins.
The office areas include larger conference and assembly rooms, while the warehouse’s 40-foot ceilings allow for supplies to be stacked five pallets high, without the beams and lower ceilings at its old space. The number of docking bays for trucks and tractor-trailers also has increased from two to 10, which Pick said has greatly improved efficiency.
The new building’s reception area features a living wall and Feed More’s logo. (Jonathan Spiers photos)
“A lot of times it was, ‘Okay, you’ve got to fill up that truck for five agencies; you have 30 minutes. Well, there’s quality issues there,” he said. “Now, I can back a truck up: ‘You’ve got the day to do it.’ All of a sudden our ability to serve our agencies is much better.”
Pick added: “The move began with necessity. The last four years, we’ve been out of space. The building we were in was fine when we started, doing about a third of what we were doing last year. We’ve been out of space and out of all the functionality.”
Feed More purchased the 9-acre Henrico site for $1.5 million last year, and it’s covering the project cost through fundraising and the pending sale of its former city property to K. Hovnanian Homes, a New Jersey-based builder that’s planning the 180-unit condo development.
Pick said the sale is scheduled to close early next year. He declined to share the sale price ahead of the closing. The 6-acre complex, beside The Park RVA and visible from the interstate, is assessed by the city at about $8.3 million.
“It will be a very significant down payment to this building,” Pick said of the sale, which he noted would add to the nonprofit’s fundraising. “Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of this community, it appears that the facility will be paid for by the end of 2025, carrying no debt.”
Pick said the project stayed on budget and schedule since breaking ground last fall. In addition to Baskervill and Hourigan, firms involved in the project included Timmons Group, which handled civil engineering work.
Feed More joins Villa Park neighbors Brown Distributing and the former Colortree printing plant that’s now home to Moore-owned Richmond Print Group. Other additions to the corridor include the Brook Villas apartments developed by Texas-based Mark Dana Corp.