We started Warehouses4Good in response to a problem that rural food pantries described to us. Those pantries were located two hours or more from the food bank serving their community. At that distance, they typically received a shipment once every 4-6 weeks.

Their problem was storage: they could only unload and store about 2-3 weeks’ worth of food, so they always ran out before the next truck arrived. They were especially short of refrigerated space, which limited their ability to manage high-nutrition value foods like fresh vegetables, dairy, eggs, and meats.

We established Warehouses4Good with a vision to bridge that gap, helping small rural pantries better serve their families.

Our initial response was to start raising funds for small storage rooms and walk-in coolers and freezers, so they could safely manage enough food to last between shipments. That approach soon changed. As people across the community learned of our work, they started asking for larger spaces to accommodate farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurial food processors, and others across the entire food chain.

Although we started out planning facilities with a few hundred square feet of space, the extra demand meant designing buildings in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 square feet. (This is still small; new cold storage buildings in urban areas are one million square feet and larger.)

At the same time, we came to understand the magnitude of the problem:

• More than 93% of merchant cold storage capacity is located in or near urban areas.
• Although 20% of Americans live in rural communities, less than 7% of merchant cold storage capacity is located there.
• Of the 1,077 counties classified as rural by USDA, only 16 of them (in 10 states) have a merchant cold storage facility.
• There are 560 rural counties that are classified as having persistent adult or child poverty; only two have a merchant cold storage facility, representing about 1% of our national capacity.
• A large number of those rural, persistent poverty counties (469) have one or more census tracts identified as rural food deserts – with almost 3.3 million people located 10 miles or more from the nearest grocery.

Considering these statistics, we’ve set a goal of building 100 facilities, each one serving 5-6 counties, to build a network that lifts up more than 500 of our most impoverished counties in the US and its Territories.