Construction of a new Meals on Wheels San Antonio facility north of downtown San Antonio is now underway, the San Antonio Business Journal reports.
The 44,000-square-foot space — which will act as the organization’s headquarters, production facility and distribution center — will allow the nonprofit to expand its operations. Currently, the organization provides 8,000 hot meals per day to clients, but the added capacity would allow it to do as many as 30,000 per day.
“Would we ever do that many meals? Probably not,” Meals on Wheels San Antonio CEO Vinsen Faris told SABJ. “But what it does give us is the capability to help and respond in in times of disaster, whether it be people coming in from the coast during a hurricane season, or like when we had all the issues earlier this year, with the cold, ice, broken water lines and all sorts of things.”
Meals on Wheels acquired the vacant site at 2718 Danbury St., near the intersection of Loop 410 and Nacogdoches Road, in 2019, according to Bexar County records.
The new facility will include a kitchen, food preparation space, volunteer training area and an expanded Grace Place Alzheimer’s Activity Center. Construction is expected to wrap up by September 2022.
Meals on Wheels is currently based in a former cafeteria at 4306 NW Loop 410, a space which Faris told the SABJ is inefficient and restrictive in terms of both food volume and quality.
Meals on Wheels San Antonio serves some 4,300 clients at their homes in Bexar and surrounding counties twice a week. It’s delivered more than 1.1 million meals in 2020 through public-private partnerships.
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This article appears in Jun 2-15, 2021.
