Introducing Wonderful Community Food Center: Now open to empower Kern County

The Community Action Partnership of Kern (CAPK), the largest food bank in Kern County, has consistently faced capacity constraints due to the high demand for food distribution across the county. However, the much-needed expansion project, initiated in 2019, is now complete, and Wonderful Community Food Center is now open. This significant expansion, spanning 40,000 square feet, was made possible through support and funding from The Wonderful Company and its co-owners, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, who provided the lead gift through their foundation alongside other local, state, federal, and private donors.

Now the Wonderful Community Food Center is a central hub with a warehouse that has grown threefold in size, from 20,000 square feet to 60,000 square feet. Additionally, there are six new loading docks, an industrial-grade freezer, refrigerators, and a dedicated space for packaging fresh produce and bread for distribution.

As the largest food bank in Kern, CAPK averages 1.7 million pounds of food each month, dispensed across more than 200 partner agencies, including churches, shelters, and community pantries.

With the opening of Wonderful Community Food Center, the expansion will help CAPK better respond to the area’s high level of food insecurity, which intensified during the pandemic and has yet to decrease. According to CAPK’s website, Kern has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the nation – including about 21% for children countywide.

As a result, a state with so much food – nearly half of the country’s produce – is seeing a spike in demand across its 41 food banks, as more than 1 in 5 Californians face limited access to food. The CAPK expansion provides some breathing room, including room to be the first county in the country to end food insecurity.

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