Project Profile: Maryland Food Bank
Scope of work:
$5.3 million renovation and expansion of kitchen, office and warehouse space
BC&E member companies involved:
Alliance Exterior Construction
Ariosa & Company
CAM Construction
Ruff Roofers
Somewhere in the midst of a four-phase, year-long, 21,000-square-foot renovation and addition project, construction professionals and nonprofit leaders had to find a way to keep generating 42 million meals.
A key component of the Maryland Food Bank project was a kitchen renovation that would nearly double its space to 3,500 square feet, upgrade and expand equipment, and create prime teaching space for FoodWorks , a training program that prepares low-income individuals for careers in commercial kitchens.
The first hitch was the original plan to do a phased renovation of the kitchen simply couldn’t work. Crews couldn’t cut gas and other services to part of the space while sustaining kitchen operations on the other side of a partition. A phased renovation would also make it nearly impossible to maintain health standards in the commercial kitchen.
So, CAM Construction pursued an alternate solution, namely sourcing and setting up a fully functional, fully licensed commercial kitchen in a 30-foot trailer in the parking lot.
“It was a daunting task,” said Everett Chambers, Project Manager.
Trailers outfitted as commercial kitchens are not easy to come by. Nor are they easy to set up and permit. CAM had to run utilities to and from the trailer, including completing a trench and piping to tie the trailer into the permanent kitchen’s grease trap (an underground holding tank). The temporary facility also had to pass multiple rounds of health inspections.
“The trailer had to be outfitted with specific pieces of equipment and meet specific requirements within the health code depending on how you are preparing meals. For example, the requirements are different for using a warming oven versus a steamer,” Chambers said. “It got down to nitty gritty details. They had to get approvals for how they were transporting food from the freezers inside the building out through the parking lot and into the trailer kitchen. It was a lot.”
Meanwhile, work on other parts of the building presented different challenges. The project involved repurposing part of the warehouse to create a two-story, 10,000-square-foot space to house 24 offices inside that existing warehouse space.
“We basically built a structural steel building inside a building. I don’t think there is even a word for that,” said Marc Munafo, President of CAM Construction.
And the project’s structural challenges didn’t end there. The food bank’s existing structure was a pre-engineered building.
“With these pre-engineered buildings, you have corrugated metal on the outside and the inside of the walls and a foam panel in between. There are really no structural elements in the wall system that you can attach any new components to,” Chambers said. “Even adding onto the sprinkler system was a challenge. If you think about the weight of a four-inch line running 40 feet across a warehouse, that can be pretty significant in a pre-engineered building that was designed to only handle its original weight calculations.”
The renovation, however, was going to increase load on the structure in several ways, including the installation of additional ventilation and other updated services in the expanded kitchen.
CAM’s solution was to add new footers beneath the building’s slab, install vertical structural posts on top of those footers then run structural beams from post to post, Munafo said. That frame could then hold the weight of new building systems and other aspects of the renovation. CAM also relocated the rooftop mechanicals to newly built platforms that transferred their weight off the building and directly to the concrete.
In addition to creating highly functional space that will enable the Maryland Food Bank to expand its food production and distribution, the project also produced a surprised aesthetic improvement, Chambers added. “We started with this blank, industrial canvas of a warehouse with high bay ceilings, high bay lights, very little to no color. The architect brought in these metal panels that are perforated with vibrant colors. It looks great.”