Central Texas Food Bank is hiring for a regional food hub in East Waco intended to increase the supply for area food ministries and serve local residents directly through a kitchen and community garden.
Construction is wrapping up on the hub at 1402 Gholson Road, which is expected to have a soft opening in early June. It will include a storage warehouse, sorting facility, public food pantry, commercial kitchen and garden. In addition, the facility will offer workforce training in culinary arts and warehouse work.
The building covers 64,000 square feet – about 1.5 times the size of a football field. That provides ample room for Central Texas Food Bank to expand to better serve counties farther north in its service area.
The food bank serves 21 counties, including Travis, Hays, McLennan and Bell counties. The northern nine counties, including McLennan, face higher rates of food insecurity than the southern counties, according to the Central Texas Food Bank’s website.
“It will enable us to get food out faster and enable us to expand direct service programs like our school pantry program,” said Central Texas Food Bank CEO Sari Vatske.
The new Waco facility will help local ministries serve food-insecure families, said Bob Gager, CEO of Shepherd’s Heart. The ministry runs a Waco food pantry and regular public food giveaways.
“I think that that’s going to take pressure off of us, because it’s tough,” Gager said.
In the nine northern counties of Central Texas Food Bank’s service area, no entity serves prepared meals to children other than school districts that participate in federal summer or afterschool food aid programs, Vatske said.
“So this facility will have an exponential impact on being able to serve kids,” Vatske said.
For Bell, Coryell, Falls, Freestone, Lampasas, Limestone, Mills, McLennan and San Saba counties, the rate of food insecurity is 19.5%, compared to 15.4% in the southern counties, food bank officials said.
In 2025, Shepherd’s Heart received 3.6 million pounds of food from the Central Texas Food Bank. The food ministry distributed a total of 4.5 million pounds last year, Gager said.
So far this year Shepherd’s Heart has received a little under a million pounds of food from the Central Texas Food Bank, Gager said.
The food hub would add an additional 3 million meals to the region each year. It currently provides a combined total of 7 to 8 million pounds to Caritas and Shepherd’s Heart. The Waco location would allow the food bank to station vehicles in Waco to deliver food to northern counties rather than reaching them from Austin, Vatske said.
“It’s going to help all of the pantries in this community to become more effective,” Gager said.
Food insecurity has been an issue for Waco as a whole, said James Lee, who grew up in East Waco and is president of the Carver Neighborhood Association.
Nearly 21% of McLennan County residents are food insecure. One in four children experience food insecurity. One in six older adults experience food insecurity, according to 2025 data from the Central Texas Food Bank.
Lee remembers going to The Salvation Army to receive food when he was growing up. He has seen the impact of food insecurity in North, South, East and West Waco.
The Central Texas Food Bank saw $7 million in federal cuts in 2025, Vatske said. Demand on food banks is expected to increase with new federal and state restrictions on SNAP funding.
“With the reduction of funds from the federal level, everyone is being impacted,” Lee said. “Everyone, and even some of these food banks are being impacted as well. And from what I get out of it, they are being sustained by a lot of private businesses that support them, which in turn gives them the opportunity to serve citizens that are in need. So until we do something about the funding, we’re going to find ourselves in a deeper need, just like we do today.”
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed in 2025 will shift some of the financial burden of SNAP onto states and impose new work requirements on many recipients. The Congressional Budget Office last year estimated that the law would reduce monthly participation in SNAP by 2.4 million Americans, making it the biggest SNAP cut in history.
“We’re concerned about maintaining accessibility to the program,” said Jeremy Everett, Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty executive director. “There’s just a lot of issues that come with that. So that’s going to impact the people in McLennan County and the Waco area potentially having access and utilizing the program.”
Despite concerns about the impact of federal changes on SNAP, Everett is excited for the Waco facility to open because it will provide more resources to Waco and the surrounding counties, Everett said.
“We have needed a high capacity anti-hunger organization that works across all of our federal nutrition programs in a way that we haven’t had,” Everett said.
