Danny Faccinetti, Oregon Food Bank Interim Vice President.“Produce is abundant here in the Northwest,” said Danny Faccinetti, Oregon Food Bank Interim Vice President. “We have a lot of food industry donors who want to give us produce. And people in the community want fresh food. Before we modernized the warehouse, the amount of produce being donated far exceeded the space we had dedicated to it in the warehouse.”
Cool change: Warehouse mods let more fresh food flow
Cool change: Warehouse mods let more fresh food flow
Almost 25 years after building Oregon Food Bank’s first statewide warehouse, we’ve made big changes to meet the needs of our communities and tackle the climate challenges of 2025. With support from a major grant from the Oregon State Legislature, we upgraded the cold storage in our 108,000-square-foot Portland warehouse. Now we can distribute even more fresh foods — like dairy, proteins and produce — across Oregon and Southwest Washington.
This created a big problem: fresh produce had to compete for space with other in-demand items like milk and eggs. Sometimes, we had to turn down large donations of fresh food simply because we didn’t have room. “We needed more cooler space to accommodate the donation opportunities out there,” said Danny.
Before our upgrades in 2024, the warehouse had more freezer than cooler space, and the cooler couldn’t handle the specific needs of items like dairy and seasonal produce. Thanks to state capital project funding from the 2021–2023 budget, we tackled the problem by swapping our freezer and cooler spaces. This move more than doubled our cooler space. We also divided the cooler into two areas with separate temperature controls, making it easier to keep foods fresh. At the same time, we reorganized the freezer layout so we didn’t lose much storage space there.
We also had to think about climate change. “Our facility was built in the early 2000s. And the refrigeration equipment was designed at a time when summers in Portland — and the whole world — were cooler. So the equipment was aging and being worked past what it was originally engineered to do, leading to failures and huge repairs,” said Danny.
On top of that, the need for food assistance is growing. Last year, we saw 2.5 million visits to food assistance sites through the Oregon Food Bank Network — a 31% increase from the previous year. Challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and expensive housing costs have made hunger an even bigger issue in our region.
When we opened our doors in 1982, no one could have imagined the needs we face today. But as our network of 21 regional food banks and 1,200 food assistance sites has grown, so has our commitment to adapt and work with our communities.
“At the end of the day, this is positioning us to be strategic about the types of food we bring in,” Danny said. “Modernizing our infrastructure allows us to capitalize on the types of donations that are abundant here in the Northwest.”
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