Three Days to Spare
Organization: Second Harvest Food Bank
How a Cold Storage Expansion Arrived Just in Time to Turn a Nation's Stranded Harvest Into a Lifeline for Orange County
In July 2019, Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County had to do something no food bank ever wants to do: turn food away. Sixteen truckloads of fresh produce, dairy, and deli meats, roughly 410,000 pounds, arrived at the organization's Irvine distribution center with nowhere cold enough to put them. Second Harvest was still running on the same 4,550-square-foot cold storage space it had installed twelve years earlier, in 2007, back when its volume of refrigerated food was a fraction of what it had become. Between 2015 and 2019, the share of pounds distributed that required refrigeration had climbed from 45.3% to 55.1%. The Food Bank's ambition, and Orange County's need, had outgrown its walk-in cooler.
TWO FAMILIES, ONE COOLER
Second Harvest brought the problem to its donor community, and two families answered within months of each other. The Ueberroth Family Foundation, already deeply invested in the Food Bank's senior nutrition programs, stepped up first, contributing a $100,000 lead gift in October 2019. January of the next year, the Schoellerman Family added $137,000 of its own toward the same expansion. Together, their support fully funded a 3,800-square-foot cold storage expansion, engineered and built by Lyons and Associates, the same contractor that had constructed Second Harvest's original cold storage space back in 2007.
Then the world changed. Construction was set to begin in April 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic upended supply chains, job sites, and daily life everywhere. Second Harvest could have let the timeline slip; every organization in the country had a reasonable excuse to. Instead, Lyons and Associates kept the project on schedule through the earliest, most uncertain months of the pandemic, and the new cooler went live in May 2020.
A RACE AGAINST THE CALENDAR
Spring 2020 produced one of the cruelest images of the pandemic: farmers plowing ripe vegetables back into the soil, dairies dumping thousands of gallons of milk down the drain, because the restaurants, schools, and hotels that normally bought their harvests had shut their doors overnight. The food hadn't disappeared. The people who needed it hadn't disappeared. They were losing jobs and lining up at food banks in numbers no one had ever seen. What had vanished, almost overnight, was the connection between the two. In April 2020, the USDA moved to rebuild that connection, launching the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) to buy up the stranded harvest and route it, box by box, into the hands of food banks like Second Harvest.
For that rescue to work in Orange County, Second Harvest needed somewhere cold enough to receive it. The Food Bank's new cold storage expansion (the one funded by the Ueberroth Family Foundation and the Schoellerman Family, built through the most uncertain months of a global shutdown) was completed in May 2020. Three days later, the first CFAP shipment of refrigerated produce, dairy, and protein pulled up to Second Harvest's dock. Three days earlier, and there would have been nowhere to put it.
What followed was the largest surge in need Second Harvest had ever faced, met almost to the week by the largest expansion of capacity it had ever built. In February 2020, before the pandemic, Second Harvest had served about 249,000 people. By May 2020, the month the cooler came online and CFAP boxes began arriving, that number was 567,000. Monthly food distribution, which had run around 2 million pounds before COVID-19, jumped to a sustained 5–6 million pounds, peaking at 7 million pounds in June 2020. Over the following fiscal year, that one cooler alone helped Second Harvest source more than 4.5 million pounds of CFAP product for Orange County families — food that, three days earlier, would have had nowhere to go. A capital project built to solve a 2019 capacity problem became, by a matter of days, the thing that let an entire county eat through the worst of a pandemic.
THE NEED KEPT GROWING — SO SECOND HARVEST BUILT AGAIN
The pandemic didn't just test the first cooler, it permanently changed how Second Harvest sources food. Facing a shrinking supply of donated goods and a community with deeper needs, the Food Bank shifted toward intentionally purchasing nutritious food such as whole fruits and vegetables, proteins, and dairy, rather than relying on whatever happened to be donated. By its FY22 sourcing plan, produce, protein, and dairy made up 67.6%, nearly 20 million pounds, of everything Second Harvest intended to source. Moving that much perishable food safely required more than a bigger cooler; it required cold docks, so nothing lost its chill between the truck and the shelf.
Second Harvest returned to Lyons and Associates, now building the Food Bank's cold storage system for a third time, and to the Ueberroth Family Foundation, which stepped forward again as lead partner on this second phase. The project broke ground in fall 2021. Supply chain shortages, the same ones slowing construction projects everywhere in 2021, pushed the original January 2022 completion date back by several weeks. On February 18, 2022, the expansion was finished: 6,200 square feet of new cold storage, including two fully operational cold dock bays, brought Second Harvest's total cold storage capacity to 14,500 square feet, or more than three times what the Food Bank had in 2019.
FROM COLD STORAGE TO A FARM OF THEIR OWN
The clearest proof of what this infrastructure made possible sits just outside Second Harvest's back door. In August 2021, while the second cold storage phase was still under construction, Second Harvest launched Harvest Solutions Farm, a partnership with the U.C. South Coast Research & Extension Center and Solutions for Urban Agriculture, to grow fresh produce for Orange County families in need. Today the Farm harvests an average of 40,000 pounds of fresh, local produce every week, broccoli, cabbage, squash, and more, nearly all of it moving directly through the cold storage this project built. None of that would be possible without somewhere cold enough, and big enough, to receive it. The expansion was covered by The Orange County Register, which profiled how, in the reporter's words, a giant refrigerator room made the difference for a food bank trying to keep up with its community's needs.
THE NEXT CHAPTER: A PROCESSING ROOM, AND ANOTHER LEAD GIFT
Even with 14,500 square feet of cold storage, Second Harvest still has to say no to good food — for a different reason now. Certain fresh produce arrives packed on ice or requires an isolated, temperature-controlled space for inspection before it can be safely accepted. Without that specific infrastructure, entire categories of donated and rescued produce have been out of reach, not because the food isn't available, but because the Food Bank has nowhere safe to receive and process it. To close that gap, Second Harvest launched a campaign to build a 2,934-square-foot, 50-degree Processing Room inside its distribution center, at a total project cost of $1.8 million covering construction and three years of operating support.
In 2026, the J.W. and Sandra L. Mitchell Foundation stepped forward as the campaign's lead donor, committing $1,113,011 toward the project. The gift guarantees that Second Harvest will break ground on the Processing Room in September 2026, with completion targeted by the end of the year. Once operational, the Processing Room is expected to add 500,000 pounds of fresh produce to Second Harvest's distribution every year and open the door to new sourcing partnerships, deepening the Food Bank's ability to reach the 453,000 families, youth, and seniors it serves each month.
Look at the throughline: a lead gift from the Ueberroth Family Foundation and a matching commitment from the Schoellerman Family funded a cooler that arrived three days ahead of a national food crisis. That success gave Second Harvest, thanks to the Ueberroth Family Foundation returning as a second-phase lead partner, the confidence to build again, bigger, with cold docks that completed a true farm-to-family cold chain. That cold chain now anchors Harvest Solutions Farm, and the trust built across both phases is what brought the J.W. and Sandra L. Mitchell Foundation to the table for the next leap forward. Four donors, three construction projects, and one continuous idea: every time Second Harvest closes one capacity gap, it finds the next family, the next senior on a fixed income, the next hungry kid on summer break, still waiting to be reached. The Mitchell Foundation's investment isn't the end of this story—it's the reason Second Harvest gets to keep writing it, one solved problem at a time, for as long as Orange County needs it to!
