Ribbon Cutting Event Celebrates New Freezer and Cooler Building

Last Friday, MANNA and our partners finally got to celebrate the official opening of our new freezer and refrigerator building – a 16,000 square-foot extension to our warehouse that will allow us to store and distribute countless pounds of fresh, nutritional food for our neighbors in need.

For nearly 500 days after Hurricane Helene, we have been storing all of our produce, meat, dairy, and eggs in 17 refrigerated trucks that were never designed to operate full time. Running them required 31,000 gallons of fuel and for our staff to come check on them across 72 weekends and 24 holidays.

During that time, we distributed 8.7 million pounds of perishable foods, but the new facility increases our cold storage capacity by 233%. These trucks allowed us to provide critical protein and nutrition in the interim, but we’ve certainly been dreaming of this ribbon cutting for a long time.

This freezer and cooler project was made possible through the unbelievable generosity of our partners at Publix Super Markets Charities, the Food Lion Feeds Charitable Foundation, Walmart For Good, the North Carolina Community Foundation, and the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina. Their funding will provide millions of pounds of fresh foods to thousands of neighbors for decades to come, and we could not be more grateful.