Major west Alabama food bank moves to a bigger location

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (WBRC) - The main food provider for underserved communities in west Alabama now calls a new location home.

The West Alabama Food Bank moved from Northport to Tuscaloosa in January, a move administrators believe will allow them to collect more food and eventually offer more services.

It left the old space on McFarland Boulevard in Northport where it had been for more than a decade into a bigger building with the infrastructure to feed even more people.

The new home for the West Alabama Food Bank is in a building on 65th Street in Tuscaloosa that once housed Buffalo Rock. With the new building comes plenty of space.

The new location comes with freezer and cooler space that allows the food bank to collect more fresh foods. It can also keep that kind of food longer because of those amenities.

“We have a cooler and freezer that can now hold 540 pallets of food. Before we had 38,” said Jean Rykaczewski, executive director of West Alabama Food Bank. “So, this year around Christmas time, we had a truckload of hams donated, which we would have had to turn down. We recovered a truckload of food, cookies on a truck that crashed. We were able to go get that. We have room now to take the large products.”

The food bank hopes to offer more on-site classes now that it has the space to host food education course.

For more information about the West Alabama Food Bank, visit westalabamafoodbank.org.

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