But before it can help fight hunger, it must fill it shelves with a delivery of food. A convoy of more than three dozen trucks began a journey from a staging area at Northwest Mall to the Houston Food Bank's new home in northeast Houston. They delivered more than one million pounds of food.
"It excites me tremendously," said one truck driver.
Within an hour a convoy of big rigs and box trucks were headed out. All sorts of food poured into the brand new 308,000 square foot Houston Food Bank.
"The local producers and distributors are very generous to us," said Houston Food Bank President Briane Greene. "So, they are actually donating regularly but this bit of extra help, when you look at the scale of what they can do – it is tremendous."
It was quite a traffic jam but a good problem for the Houston Food Bank with more than 30 big trucks and more than 1 million pounds in donated food. There was a big celebration to mark the grand opening of the $55 million facility -- now the largest of any food bank in the entire country.
With the new Houston Food Bank now 4 times the size of the old one, there's a massive amount of space for more food, more volunteers and more ways to help the nearly 1 million families served every year.
"The Food Bank is already distributing about 5 tractor trailer loads of food everyday 6 days a week," said Greene. "So this is not the end of it. We are going to be here year round fighting hunger."
Nearly 500 food pantries, senior centers, soup kitchens get their food through the Food Bank and they hope the new facility they can do even more.
