Moving day

PALMER — Alaska Food Bank employees spent the day before America’s official national feast clearing food out of a warehouse used for 18 months to store groceries packed for distribution to the needy.

Executive director Susannah Morgan brought her work clothes, and probably should have brought earplugs as well. Moving the last of the tons of food donated to the bank at the former supermarket site on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway was a big, noisy job. All of it moved to locations elsewhere around the Valley for Thanksgiving distributions.

“It’s definitely ironic,” Morgan said of the moving date. “But we’ll still be serving the Valley.”

Crashes of cargo landing in a truck bed and low, concrete-amplified rumbling of freight rolling aboard a much-used pallet jack drowned out the constant overhead buzz of harsh sodium vapor lighting as work went at an almost frenzied pace. Morgan’s crew scrambled to move out of the food bank’s mostly empty Palmer warehouse by the end of Wednesday, knowing the building’s new tenant wouldn’t mind if a few odds and ends had to be picked up later.

The biggest remaining pile, boxes of microwave popcorn, canned vegetables and canned pumpkin pie filling, were ready to head to the Burchell High campus in Wasilla later in the day.

The warehouse will soon become a central dairy processing plant for a new Valley cooperative allowing local farmers to produce all-Alaska milk and cheese products. Morgan said she’s sad the food bank has to leave the building, but if there’s any tenant for which she’d gladly make way, it is a co-op to produce all-Alaska grown products.

“We’re very supportive of the dairy, a place for locally grown food and milk,” Morgan said as janitorial and other supplies were being blister-packed nearby by two busy workers.

Morgan said dairy organizers have pledged to donate extra products to the food bank should any accrue. Now all the food bank needs is an indoor location from which to run its virtual food bank in the Valley.

Plans now are for trucks to roll into the dairy facility’s lots so local agencies can pick up food supplies without a drive to Anchorage. That parking lot was a treacherous ice patch Wednesday morning. Morgan said she hopes someone has a spare loading dock or part of a building the food bank might use.

In with the new

As frenzied as the food bank’s moving-out process was this week, that’s how fast Southcentral Alaska Dairy Joint Venture manager Kyle Beus will have to oversee the installation of processing equipment rushed from Outside and Anchorage to meet a mid-December deadline. That’s when the state stops picking up milk from Valley dairy farms, and Beus hopes to go online with cheese processing by then at the Palmer-Wasilla Highway plant.

“It’s all good,” said Beus, who met with a dairy engineer Wednesday and planned to survey the new plant later in the afternoon. Beus expects the co-op to make fast progress in the facility, which was previously the location for Alaska Premium Food Source before its move to Pittman Road. The plant comes with a walk-in freezer section and cold cases already built in.

The food bank’s operations will continue without the warehouse, which had been a central Mat-Su location to serve Valley food distribution agencies due to a donated lease. State and federal grants the food bank had counted upon fell through and funding never materialized to keep the branch open. The branch facility helped get food to the Mat-Su Borough’s estimated 8,600 clients.

Morgan said she is happy the food bank used the facility as long as it did and would not have done a thing differently.

“I don’t have any regrets. We served a lot of people and helped a lot of people,” she said.

The agency “has been delighted by the opportunity to provide better service and more food to the Mat-Su Valley through the Branch,” Morgan said. "We are sad to leave this facility but we are not abandoning the agencies and hungry people who count on us. We remain dedicated to our mission of ending hunger, and we are already looking for a permanent facility for the Branch."

The food bank collects food from local manufacturers, food processors, retailers, farmers and fishermen. In fiscal year 2007, the food bank reports it distributed 6 million pounds of food — a record-high — through more than 300 partner agencies across the state. The food bank estimates it served more than 83,000 Alaskans.

Contact John R. Moses at john.moses@frontiersman.com or call 352-2270.