After years of planning and stretching the capacity limits as far as it could go in its old distribution center, Food Bank of the Rockies opened the doors to its new Aurora distribution center in early February.

The organization said in a news release that the 270,000-square-foot distribution center in Aurora will enable Food Bank of the Rockies to:

• Reduce operating costs by more than $500,000 annually by consolidating operations and investing in sustainability measures.
• Triple its cold-storage capacity, allowing it to receive and safely distribute up to 50 percent more fresh produce and accept significantly more rescued food.
• Triple its capacity for volunteers, which means triple the impact on how much food it can process.
• Quadruple the number of meals for kids it can deliver to after-school and summer programs.
• Expand its workforce-development program.

Food Bank of the Rockies has a distribution center in Grand Junction at 698 Long Acre Drive, and Joanna Wise, Food Bank of the Rockies’ press relations manager, said Grand Junction’s center stands to benefit from the improved Aurora location.

“More than 70 percent of the food we distribute through the Aspen to Parachute corridor, mountain communities and the entire Western Slope comes through our Aurora distribution center first,” Wise said. “That makes this new building, the capacity of it, directly relevant to the communities that we are serving all across our service area, including the Western Slope communities.”

Wise said the Aurora distribution center’s expanded kitchen will be able to create more meals from scratch.

“Our new kitchen, currently we’re able to do around 2,700 meals a day. Eventually we’ll be able to scale that up to about 10,000 meals that’s distributed across our service area,” she said.

The center also has expanded cooler space, which Wise said “really is the game changer for our operations. It will allow us to be able to increase the amount of frozen donations, especially proteins that we’re able to bring in. It will also allow us to increase the amount of fresh produce that we can accept and be able to distribute.”