Amid growing need, The River Food Pantry expands

The new facility will make it easier for volunteers and staff to serve

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Dane County’s busiest food pantry will soon triple in size. The River already leads other area food pantries in the number of persons served and amount of food distributed. When it moves into its new, custom-designed building at 3301 Packers Ave. on Madison’s north side in January, it will  have 32,500 square feet in which to provide services.

The new facility brings to mind the best of industrial farmhouse style: outside, white and gray metal siding and big black-framed windows; inside, white walls and light wood floors, reclaimed barnboard sliding doors, and lots of light coming in those big windows.

Contrast that to The River’s current 11,000-square-foot space in a rented warehouse nearby on Darwin Road. The pantry has operated there since 2006 and outgrew it even before the pandemic hit. It’s windowless, drab, crowded, and lacks the infrastructure to efficiently store groceries and prepare the number of meals that The River provides.

The River’s programs include grocery pickup and FAM (Family-at-Home) prepared meals Tues.-Fri.; delivery to homebound individuals; the Munch van, which delivers mobile meals and some grocery staples to low-income neighborhoods; and an after-hours emergency food locker system to provide a stopgap supply of non-perishable food when the pantry is closed.

“Before the pandemic there were a limited number of ways we served clients,” says executive director Rhonda Adams. COVID made the staff rethink the ways they were getting food to clients. During the crisis, the question became “What can we do to eliminate barriers?” says Adams. The new building was designed to do just that.

It was built thanks to a successful $12 million capital campaign and the organization enters into its new era debt-free, says Adams.

“I’ve been at The River for almost 13 years,” Adams says. “If you’d told me [then] that people are going to drive up in the parking lot and you’re going to go out [to the cars] and serve them, I would have thought you were crazy.” Before the pandemic, people came into the building and picked groceries off shelves.

When pandemic restrictions ended, The River never returned to indoor shopping. “People told us they like to stay in their car,” Adams says — possibly because of physical or mental health issues, having small children, or being seniors. “So this building is intentionally built as a drive-through.”

The new facility boasts a heated check-in booth in the parking lot and two garage bays where pantry visitors can drive inside and check off their grocery lists and volunteers can deliver the groceries to them, protected from the elements. The current setup is outside and makeshift, with volunteers having to battle rain and snow during bad weather.

The new kitchen looks ready for a reality TV cooking competition, with a commercial 10-burner stove (up from four) and a commercial tilt skillet, which is able to cook large amounts of food at once. The tilt skillet will be “a miracle when we do pasta, a meal the clients really love but it’s no small feat,” Adams says, explaining that the current four-burner stove can handle only one large pot at a time. The tilt skillet can heat 40 gallons of water in its own tub, adds operations director Helen Osborn-Senatus.

There will also be plenty of accessible pallet storage and “a refrigerator and freezer you can drive a forklift into,” says Osborn-Senatus. Currently food that needs to be kept cold is primarily stored off-site at a nearby church.

The current facility has no space for gathering together for a meal. The new building has a dedicated dining room and even an adjacent patio area for outdoor meals in good weather.

There’s also a pass-through window and a “dish pit” — a large tub in a room dedicated to cleaning and storing dishes.

“This is all designed by our kitchen meals manager, Chris Tuttle. This is truly his dream come true,” says Adams.

A reception area is near a room where clients will be able to select donated clothes, at no cost. (The clothing program went on hiatus in March 2020 due to the need for more food storage in the Darwin Road warehouse.) The new building also includes staff offices, a room for volunteers, space for interns, classrooms, and office space for other small nonprofits.

Three truck docks and a drive-up ramp will help with deliveries and food recovery efforts, “sorting food and getting it into the appropriate storage quickly to maintain food safety temperatures and then preparing [it] for our programs,” says Osborn-Senatus.

The building is also green, with a zero-emission geothermal HVAC system, solar microgrid, bird-safe glass, and an all-electric kitchen.

Still, Adams says the old facility “may not look that pretty, but there’s been a lot of magic when you bring the volunteers and the staff together in serving the community. But now there’s extra magic because we have a very dignified and special building.”

And the new facility is arriving just in time. In 2024 The River served 19,000 unique individuals; it has already served 18,000 as of September of this year.

And disruptions to FoodShare funds due to the federal shutdown mean that even more people are counting on food pantries. A fundraising drive called “Pack the Pantry” aims to fill the new space’s shelves with food during January as staff and volunteers work to hone systems in the new space, with a full launch date of February. During the January transition, The River will distribute groceries from the parking lot of St. Paul Lutheran Church, 2126 N. Sherman Ave., beginning on Jan. 9, twice a week until the new facility opens for good — on, Adams hopes, Jan. 27.