Shelves of food tower to the ceiling in Food Bank of the Rockies’ new distribution center, which now houses all of the hunger-relief organization’s operations.

FBR officials celebrated the 270,000-square-foot facility’s grand opening Thursday, leading visitors through room after room of new space that will help the nonprofit organization meet the “urgent and growing” needs of people in Colorado and Wyoming, officials said.

The new distribution center doubles FBR’s cold storage for fresh and frozen food, triples volunteer capacity, quadruples kitchen space, increases storage capacity by more than half and will help FBR expand its workforce development program.

It will also save the organization more than $500,000 annually by consolidating operations from two buildings into one.

Previously, FBR accommodated about 100 volunteers each day. Expanded facility space allows them to accommodate up to 300 volunteers each day, FBR Chief of Staff Steve Kullberg said Thursday.

The demand is high, he added, saying there’s been a backlog of people who want to volunteer but not enough space to take them all.

At the new center, FBR has almost 10 times the staging space for delivered items, including room to park more than 50 semi-trucks, Kullberg said. Increased space means more efficient delivery systems.

“Sourcing and distributing that level of food at our previous distribution centers was not only logistically challenging, but nearly impossible,” CEO Erin Pulling said.

The new center also means FBR can improve the quality of food its distributes and focus on culturally relevant food, Kullberg said.

For members of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshoni people in Wyoming, this means providing food to homes of their elders and sourcing choke cherries and specialty items for ceremonies, FBR Tribal Relations Specialist Jackie White said Thursday.

“There’s no greater honor amongst our people than to give one another food,” White said, quoting an Arapahoe elder.

Currently, FBR’s service area covers about 150,000 square miles, including all 23 counties in Wyoming and 32 counties in Colorado. While they don’t necessarily plan on expanding that service area currently, they will be able to distribute about 50% more food than they could previously and be “more deliberate and purposeful with how we serve and the type of food we’re serving,” Kullberg said.

With the recent government shutdown and SNAP benefit pause, FBR saw a spike in the need for its services, he said. From the end of October through January, it purchased more than 150 additional truckloads of food to meet the “record-high” need, Pulling said.

That increased need is expected to continuously grow, Kullberg said.

The sheer size of the center made Aurora the best place for it, Kullberg said. His team struggled to find a big enough property — they needed 14 acres — for a price they could afford, he said.

The space they landed on, which lies in Aurora just southwest of the Denver International Airport, offered enough land ready for building, he said.

Mayor Mike Coffman said Aurora is “proud to be part of this effort.”

“This is about so much more than just the building,” he said. “It’s a hub that supports all of Aurora and the region … This is what it looks like to come together and empower families in Aurora and beyond, offering not just meals but also hope, stability and opportunity.”

Gov. Jared Polis thanked FBR before Thursday’s ribbon cutting, saying the work the organization does in Colorado is “critical.”

“Food is the most basic need of people and nobody should have to go to bed hungry,” Polis said. “This exciting opening is really just the beginning as we work to make sure everyone in our state can be healthy.”