Fresh Foods

Kern’s Bakery (Kern’s Food Hall)

July 9, 2024 by

Born in Germany in 1836, Peter Kern emigrated to the United States and settled in Knoxville during the Civil War. By the third quarter of the 19^th century, Kern’s Bakery was established in downtown Knoxville, growing steadily in subsequent decades to become an established, beloved regional bakery. Acquired in 1989 by Sara Lee, the now-discontinued Kern’s brand remains a touchstone in the memories of Knoxvillians.

Sara Lee operated the principal Kern’s facility on Chapman Highway until 2012. For nearly a decade, plans gestated to redevelop the shuttered property, a prominent Knoxville landmark. In 2017, the historic bakery, constructed incrementally from 1931, was successfully listed on the National Register of Historic Places, though further development stalled after some exterior rehabilitation work was completed.

In 2019, Kern’s Bakery was acquired by a team led by Atlanta-based Mallory & Evans who envisioned a $32 million project that would convert the former Kern’s Bakery industrial facility into a mixed-use destination retail and food hall development to anchor the booming South Knoxville riverfront.

Hired to provide contingent fee-based historic preservation consulting and tax credit arranging services, Crescent Growth Capital structured a financing incorporating Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits, PACE funding, a TIF grant from Knoxville city government, bridge financing for the historic tax credit equity, and construction and senior loans. Crescent closed on the project’s financing in February of 2022 and then structured and closed, in December 2023, a financing to take out the PACE funding component.

Crescent’s in-house historic preservation specialist prepared a five-element Historic Preservation Certification Application (including multiple Part 2 amendments) over a three-year period. Part 3 approval of the HPCA was received on July 1, 2024, by which point Kern’s Food Hall had debuted, delighting Knoxvillians who still cherished memories of Peter Kern’s community business.

Second Harvest of the Big Bend

April 3, 2024 by

Second Harvest of the Big Bend was founded in 1982 and first focused on collecting and distributing perishable food. An affiliate of the nationwide Feeding America food bank network. Second Harvest’s service area consists of an expansive, sixteen-county region in the central Florida Panhandle. Last year, SHBB distributed a record 13.8 million pounds of food donated by national manufacturers, food wholesalers and distributors, other regional food banks, local food retailers, regional farmers, local food drives and individual donors. SHBB also routinely purchases some foods at a wholesale rate and distributes U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Commodities through The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). In 2022 SHBB served over 120,000 individuals, 59.4% of whom were members of ethnic or racial minorities.

SHBB has developed several programs tailored to its clients, many of whom live in remote rural areas (51.5% of all clients). Twelve mobile pantries, known as “Just in Time” distribution vehicles, are often located in church or nonprofit parking lots in a farmers’ market-style distribution, while the Senior Grocery Program provides low-income seniors with supplemental nutrition at the end of the month, when seniors’ financial resources are often depleted. (Over a quarter of those SHBB serves are seniors.)

Despite last year’s record level of food distribution, the end of pandemic-era assistance programs has triggered an explosion in demand, and SHBB estimates that a near-doubling of its annual capacity, to 25 million pounds, is required to adequately serve those struggling with food insecurity.

In March of 2024, in partnership with Hampton Roads Ventures, CCG Community Partners, and Truist Bank, Crescent closed on a $13.0M Federal NMTC financing to upgrade and expand its existing facilities, technology, programs and staff. An $11 million facility expansion will fund:

Volunteer Hub – a dedicated food-loading workspace to separate volunteers from forklift operators and improve safety;
Community Training Center – a space for training food safety and nutrition education specialists;
Community Wellness and Education Center – a demonstration kitchen to educate food-insecure persons in gardening, nutrition, food preparation and cooking – resulting in self-sufficiency and better nutrition;
Agricultural Education Center – a new, outdoor education area for demonstrations and workshops, to include a greenhouse, room for additional gardens, raised beds and row crops, plus a composter to generate soil and reduce landfill waste.

Eight new full-time staffers will be leveraged to supervise the planned aggressive expansion in output, new equipment will ease the difficulties SHBB encounters in serving its rural clients, and new technology will support both better internal performance and improve cooperation with the 135 nonprofit partners SHBB collaborates with to serve its highly-disadvantaged, “majority-minority”, mostly rural client base within its sixteen-county service area. SHBB’s significantly improved capability in its designated role as the North Florida Disaster Hub will also greatly benefit its clientele, whose poverty renders them especially vulnerable to climate change-induced extreme weather events.

Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma

February 15, 2022 by

CFBEO is Feeding America’s designated food bank for the twenty-four county region of eastern Oklahoma centered around Tulsa. In 2019, the food bank distributed a record 28.9 million pounds of food.

In 1981, in response to the rising number of people struggling with hunger, Tulsa’s Neighbor for Neighbor feeding program evolved to become the Tulsa Community Food Bank. Operating from a small, donated warehouse space, in year one the food bank provided food assistance to 25 partner agencies and distributed 90,000 pounds of food, the equivalent of 75,000 meals.

In 2006, the Food Bank opened its current facility, the Donald W. Reynolds Food Distribution Center. That year the Food Bank distributed 7.5 million pounds of food, a record at the time.

Since its founding, the food bank has also steadily grown its service area and has continued to expand the scope of its services. Programs include on-site feeding programs, emergency shelters, emergency food pantries, children and senior feeding programs, veterans’ outreach initiatives, disaster relief and other low-income programs that have a meal component. All of these programs provide food free of charge to people who struggle with hunger in the community.

The food bank’s work also includes direct feeding programs such as Cooking Matters, Food for Kids, and Senior Servings, as well as clinic pantries, mobile pantries, and culinary center and college campus pantries. Collectively the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma coordinates more than 380 direct feeding sites.

In 2019, the food bank distributed a record 28.9 million pounds of food, the equivalent of more than 24 million meals, to the hungry. The food bank distributes food via both direct programs and through 350 partner agencies, located in the 24 counties of eastern Oklahoma that comprise nearly 30,000 square miles and contain a population of more than 1.5 million people.

Despite these ongoing successes, CFBEO’s distribution center has been bursting at the seams for years. At 78,000 square feet, the facility was designed to have the capacity to distribute 20 million pounds of food annually.

In February of 2022, in partnership with Hampton Roads Ventures, Heartland Renaissance Fund and Capital One, Crescent closed on a $16M NMTC financing to construct the new Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.

CFBEO will add 66,000 SF to CFBEO’s existing 78,000 SF facility, increasing its design capacity from 20 million pounds of food distributed annually to nearly 52 million pounds of food distributed annually. Even though improved workflows will greatly boost the productivity of CFBEO’s existing workforce, additional hiring will be needed, resulting in nine permanent new positions. Approximately 250 construction jobs will also be generated by the facility expansion component of the Build Hope campaign. A new 12,500 SF food preparation kitchen will enable the growth in prepared meal distribution, and fresher, more nutritious offerings will be made available.

Oasis Grocery Store

September 8, 2021 by

For many years, the north Tulsa community has suffered from food insecurity evidenced by enormous disparities in health quality and life expectancy. Most studies reference the USDA’s research atlas which provides both precise and poignant data on the target area, identifying seventeen north Tulsa census tracts as food deserts. Additionally, a past report of the Regional Food Bank indicated that one in six Oklahomans struggles with hunger. Data suggests this statistic may be double in north Tulsa due to the interrelated issues of food access, hunger, and economic instability.

Tulsa Economic Development Corporation (TEDC) is a catalyst for economic prosperity in Tulsa’s under-resourced communities. While TEDC’s primary focus is providing progressive lending to promising businesses that create job opportunities for low-and-moderate income Tulsans, the organization launched a new priority in 2020, known as Project Oasis Fresh Market, a public-private collaboration designed to reduce the footprint of food deserts in one of Tulsa’s most important communities.

Oasis Fresh Market is located in an extended area of Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District. Known in the early 20^th century as “Black Wall Street”, the area was once one of the most affluent and commercially viable predominately African-American areas in the country. The district was burned to the ground during the race massacre of 1921, as 300 black residents were murdered, hundreds more were injured, and 5,000 people were rendered homeless. The area has been a primary focus of redevelopment for decades, and though development has happened slowly, the racial equity component of the development has had minimal minority investment or inclusion.

In September, 2021, CGC and TEDC closed on a $7M NMTC financing to complete the Oasis Fresh Market building, utilizing NMTC allocation provided by Hampton Roads Ventures and US Bank Community Development. The new 16,425 sf grocery store will create 21 new FTE’s.

Homeland Grocery

December 3, 2020 by

Since 1993, community stakeholders and City Councilmembers have been trying to bring a full-service grocer to Northeast Oklahoma City, going so far as to create the NE Renaissance TIF District, and providing $4,400,000 in TIF financing to incentivize a developer to build a grocery store in the neighborhood.

In early 2020, a development partnership between The Alliance for Economic Development of Oklahoma City, Inc., Northeast Equity Group and TR Partners negotiated a long term lease with HAC, Inc. to bring a Homeland Food Store to NE 36th and N. Lincoln Blvd (the “Project”). The new full-service store will be in a unique position to provide healthy affordable alternatives to fast food, in a USDA Food Desert that currently has no full-service grocery store, and has seen 2 of its limited-service grocery stores close within the last 2 years.

The Project is expected to create 75 new full time jobs, earning competitive wages, a broad suite of benefits and the potential for ownership: HAC Inc. offers all full time employees a no cost participation in its Employee Stock Ownership Program (“ESOP”). The ESOP is set up as a retirement plan on the employees’ behalf, and after 3 years of service, the ESOP becomes 100% vested in the employees account.

The Homeland Grocery project at 36th and Lincoln is part of an overall master development plan that includes the City of Oklahoma City Senior Wellness Center, which will be operated in part by Langston University, the state of Oklahoma’s only Historically Black College and University. During the Wellness Center planning stage, a grocery store was identified as a critical co-anchor for the master plan.

In August, 2020, Crescent Growth Capital was engaged by the Homeland team to pursue a New Market Tax Credit (“NMTC”) financing to construct a new, 30,000 sf full-service grocery store, including a bakery, deli, and pharmacy with drive through. A total of $10.5M of NMTC allocation was provided by Heartland Renaissance Fund and US Bank, with US Bank also serving as the NMTC investor, providing an estimated $1.5M of NMTC net benefit for the project.

San Antonio Food Bank – Phase II

January 28, 2020 by

Founded in 1980, the San Antonio Food Bank (“SAFB”) is a non-profit organization that serves as a clearinghouse, receiving and storing donated food, fresh produce, and other groceries. SAFB distributes these items in manageable quantities to over 500 independent partner agencies that help people in need. However, SAFB’s activities are not limited to distributing food to street-level food kitchens; SAFB also operates programs to help people escape the poverty that results in chronic hunger and encourages better nutrition throughout the region via additional services.

Texas is ranked 2nd in the country in household incidences of food insecurity – unreliable access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food – with 1 in 6 Texans living in food insecure households. The need in San Antonio is even more dire: one in five adults, and one in four children reported struggling with food insecurity in the past year. Seniors are equally at risk, and often have to choose between adequate nutritious food and vital medical services.

SAFB has grown its reach to include 16 counties, feeding 58,000 people a week. Of the 58,000 clients served weekly, 35% are children, 25% routinely have to choose between food and medical services, 46% work and still face food insecurity, and 67% have incomes below the federal poverty level.

The new 50,000 sf facility will house a production kitchen, an expanded area for culinary training, a vegetable prep plant, and a seasonal venison processing plant.

Beyond the physical characteristics of the new facility, it will support four key SAFB efforts, the Culinary Training Program, the Production Kitchen, a “Grab-and-Go” salad prep plant, and SAFB’s “Hunters for the Hungry” program. The SAFB has run a hugely successful culinary training program for more than a decade that targets the homeless, disabled, and long-term unemployed with the training. This new facility would offer new classroom and teaching space. The greater San Antonio region has hundreds of unfilled positions today in the hospitality industry, and this expansion would allow SAFB to double the number of participants per class (from 8-10 per class to 16-20 per class). Classes run in 18 week blocks and will soon be offered with a guaranteed job and stipend.

The new facility would be home to a state-of-the-art production kitchen capable of putting out more than 10,000 meals a day. One of SAFB’s primary goals is to meet the near-constant demand for meals for children and seniors but the kitchen in the existing facility limits SAFB’s ability to meet that demand. The new kitchen will operate 2-3 shifts per day and as many as 7 days a week. The addition of this kitchen would allow the current kitchen on the Westside campus to become home to Catalyst Catering, SAFB’s social enterprise, which is now using a kitchen offsite.

This development plan also includes a new “Grab-and-Go” salad prep plant where SAFB would wash, store, prep/chop, and assemble healthy salads (with as much of the produce as possible coming from its own farms) for distribution via its social enterprise efforts and mission programs. The organization is the leader in southwest Texas in promoting healthy eating, and the addition of a salad prep plant would afford a wider variety of healthy food options to those facing hunger. SAFB envisions the salads offered on a Grab-and-Go model, creating a new source of revenue to support its catering and Mobile Mercado social enterprise programs.

Lastly, the new 50,000 building will expand SAFB’s existing “Hunters for the Hungry” program that allows individual hunters and ranch owners to donate harvested deer to be processed for free, with the venison going to the SAFB as an additional source of high-quality protein for its meals. South Texas has the largest deer population in the United States and existing local processors participating in similar programs that use harvested deer to feed the hungry simply cannot handle the volume. So SAFB plans on addressing this opportunity by building out its own (seasonal) processing plant to meet the need.

The SAFB may also expand this processing plant to allow for the processing of feral hogs, which cost Texas neighborhoods, farms and ranches hundreds of millions of dollars in damage each year. The State of Texas allows for hogs to be trapped live and taken to a USDA inspected facility for harvesting. This new processing plant would help address both the State’s ballooning feral hog population and its pervasive food insecurity.

In January, 2020, Crescent Growth Capital assisted SAFB with the closing of a $19M NMTC financing, utilizing allocation provided by Texas Mezzanine Fund, McCormick Baron Salazar, and PeopleFund and an investment from US Bank.

This project will create 9 direct FTE positions, as well as an estimated 40 construction jobs. Furthermore, the culinary training program will soon be able to offer its graduates with a guaranteed job as well as a stipend, so the ancillary job creation from this programming alone will be roughly 120 positions over the first three years.

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