The Pantry at Hamilton Mill broke ground on a new 7,000-square-foot facility, a major upgrade for a Gwinnett County nonprofit that has outgrown the church hallways it has relied on for years. The new building is designed to expand the pantry's capacity to serve families across the metro Atlanta area.
The groundbreaking, reported by CBS News Atlanta, marks a turning point for an organization that started small and grew fast. Founded in 2009, The Pantry at Hamilton Mill served just 25 families a month at the outset and now distributes more than one million pounds of food annually to over 2,500 families every month, according to GuideStar.
That growth has been driven in large part by the pantry's weekly Saturday distributions in Dacula, which run from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m. and hand out more than 25,000 pounds of groceries to roughly 700 to 800 families in a single morning, per Cause IQ. Volunteers help keep those distributions running.
What the New Facility Adds
The purpose-built warehouse is meant to fix that bottleneck. It will include commercial walk-in refrigeration and freezers, conveyor packing systems, a covered drive-through distribution lane, and flexible staging space for community workshops, according to GuideStar. Those upgrades are designed to let the pantry move more food, more efficiently, with volunteers helping handle and move food.
The Pantry is led by Executive Director Rev. Steve Ring and serves families in Gwinnett County.
Federal and Local Dollars Behind the Build
The construction is backed by a mix of public funding sources. In August, the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners approved an $8.9 million federally funded HUD Action Plan that steered $1,536,600 in Community Development Block Grants directly toward building the new facility, according to WSB-TV. Gwinnett County also awarded the pantry a separate $100,000 grant through its local Nonprofit Capacity Building Grant Program to strengthen capital operations, per Gwinnett County Government.
Expanding Food Assistance in Gwinnett County
The warehouse expansion is another effort to address food needs in Gwinnett County.
The Pantry's growth reflects demand for food assistance in Gwinnett County.
Gwinnett County also has six local co-ops as part of its food-assistance network.
The new warehouse adds to Gwinnett County's food-assistance network. The pantry also holds Saturday drive-through distributions.
