BELLVILLE — Thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation, more food will be distributed to Richland County families.

The donation is being used to fund a refrigerated truck for the Bellville Neighborhood Outreach Center and to transport an additional 400,000 pounds of food annually, including more than 200,000 pounds of fresh produce.

The truck was unveiled Thursday at BNOC, located at 84 Main St. in Bellville.

“This has been about a year in the making,” said Jessica Morgan, director of agency services with the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

“Of the 200 food banks across the country, we are kind of trail blazers right now because there’s no other food bank that has done a process like this before.”

BNOC has been one of the Cleveland Food Bank’s partner agencies since 2001.

“In those 17 years, they have been able to provide 1.8 million meals to families in Richland County,” Morgan said. “That is incredible, the work that they have done.”

BNOC accomplishes this through its free-choice food pantry, produce distributions, Backpacks for Kids Program and the Senior Box Program, which distributes food specifically to low-income seniors, age 60 and over. 

BNOC was the Cleveland Food Bank’s first food resource center.

“What that means is that they’ve agreed to not only distribute more food and help more people, but also help to provide access to additional wrap-around services, which is something that they did already and we’re just helping to build their capacity,” Morgan said.

While retail pickups are nothing new to the Cleveland Food Bank, Morgan said they are still fairly new its agency partners.

“A couple of years ago, most of the retail pickups that the food bank facilitated was all done by the food bank,” she said. “So we would take our trucks and we would head out to different grocery stores and pick up product and take it back to the food bank, store it, and then distribute it to our partners across six counties.”

Like the food bank, BNOC is no stranger to retail pickups, as the organization currently does an agency-enabled pickup at Aldi, Kroger and Save-A-Lot.

Now with the refrigerated truck, BNOC will be able to do even more retail pickups.

Three days a week, BNOC will pick up food at three different locations each day — the two local Walmart stores and Sam’s Club. The food will be delivered to BNOC once a week, as well as fellow Cleveland Food Bank partners — Catholic Charities and Grace Episcopal Church — both once a week.

“Through this partnership with Walmart and Sam’s Club, Richland County will be able to provide 300,000 meals a year,” Morgan said.

This is especially significant considering Richland County’s food insecure population is estimated at 15.3 percent for year 2016, according to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap project.

Read more about food insecurity in Richland County here. 

“We’re really excited, a little scared, but very excited,” said Matt Merendino, president of BNOC.

“It’s a pretty big effort for us to do, but we are anxious to get about it and to be able to provide more meals, more food for people in need in our community around Richland County.”