La Soupe Unveils New Loading Dock and Basement Expansion to Support Growth

Written by John Hahn

On March 11, 2024, La Soupe opened its newly finished loading dock. The 6,000-square-foot addition to its basement will allow La Soupe to continue its growth and reach its goal of sharing 1.8 million servings annually for the community by Fiscal year 2026. This new space includes 900 square feet of refrigerator and freezer storage, as well as faster pickup and drop-off times for La Soupe’s volunteers and a safer workflow for employees.

La Soupe first moved to its current location at 915 E McMillan St in Walnut Hills in 2020. Previously, La Soupe had been serving food out of a 900-square-foot building in Newtown. La Soupe’s Executive Director, Emmy Schroder said, “When I started in 2019, we were thinking about moving, but no real tactical steps had been made yet. It was fun to be part of the initial dream, design, and build out of a space to grow into.”

When it comes to why La Soupe chose Walnut Hills, there were many factors. Walnut Hills’ Kroger had just closed, leaving the neighborhood vulnerable to becoming a victim of food apartheid. Food apartheid happens when fresh food is not easily accessible and residents must resort to buying most of their food from corner stores, which do not have much fresh food, or traveling to get fresh food. Walnut Hills also has a reliable power grid with little downtime each year due to its proximity to local hospitals. “It felt like a place where we could make an impact on our immediate community. Newtown is far out east, so we had a very east-side-based volunteer force and staff because it was 25 minutes east of the city. So now, with Walnut Hills being so central, we’re able to maximize our distribution capability and reach,” said Schroder.

La Soupe was almost ready to move its operations to Walnut Hills after a year and a half of planning and construction in March 2020. Then, COVID changed everything and postponed the opening. In the meantime, La Soupe had to stop working with volunteers and had nowhere to store all of the food it was receiving. Thanks to its hard-working employees and “Angel Bob,” La Soupe persevered. Bob Davis, owner of Firehouse Grill and Brewery in Blue Ash, offered his facilities and three of his employees to La Soupe to keep doing the work necessary to keep people fed. Gordon Food Services also gave La Soupe a refrigerated truck during the six weeks it was in Blue Ash.

The new basement expansion area was left unfinished when La Soupe finally moved to Walnut Hills. Model Group, who leases the building to La Soupe, recommended a parking lot be placed in that area. However, La Soupe was not ready to decide yet. It quickly became apparent that La Soupe would need more space at its Walnut Hills location. Its partner waitlist was growing longer and longer and the meal gap, what food people have versus what they need, was growing wider and wider. The initial idea was to use the new basement expansion area to store pallets. However, La Soupe would need to finish this part of the basement to make it Board of Health certified. With wide support of its mission, La Soupe determined this area could enable greater impact while creating safer work conditions for its employees if transformed into a new dock space. “It’s a little hard to forecast how much more production you can do out of space when you decide, but of course, you have to. We produced just under 900,000 servings in 2021 when we were first making this decision. We said ‘By the time this basement is done and we are fully utilizing it at its max capacity, we think we can double that.’ This year, we’re on track to do about 1.1 million, so we’ve grown a little bit already. Over the next three years, we still feel that we can do that much more,” said Schroder.

In 2022, La Soupe and Taste of Belgium (La Soupe’s sublessee) came to an agreement stating plans for what they each needed in terms of storage capacity and what deliveries would look like. This new space would mean that large trucks would still deliver to the old lift dock, but the new dock would provide a car pick-up and drop-off area on the ground, reducing congestion. La Soupe’s Dock Manager at the time, Katie Funk, Executive Chef Miranda Maszk, and long-term volunteer Cathy Swartz were instrumental in planning what La Soupe would need. To complete the construction of the new basement expansion, La Soupe ran a $1.3 million capital campaign to cover the buildout, and wages for additional employees.

While La Soupe is expanding its meal and soup-making capabilities, its focus will always be on quality over quantity. Through discussions with its staff and board, this message has been resounding. “There are lots of strategies we can put in place around checking our quality, from getting feedback from our communities to intentionally having our chefs check each other and look at the food that’s going out the door to having good people to put good processes in place. Having the right conversations with everyone involved to make sure that we are all working in a comfortable place where we can raise the alarm when something doesn’t feel quality,” said Schroder.

As a part of La Soupe’s dock team, the first two weeks in the new basement expansion area have been great. I remember our old basement freezer being full to the brim and having to move soups and meals from the basement to the old upstairs dock. Now, the soupes and meals go in our new freezer downstairs immediately and there’s plenty of space to move around and take inventory. There’s also no more carrying orders down the old dock stairs to cars that are waiting because a truck was in the way, which was the bane of my existence. In general, the new dock is a lot safer, no more lifting 500 pounds of compost onto the lift or dropping 50 dented industrial food cans off the lift to take to the trash. It’s also really helpful that volunteers and kitchen staff no longer have to move soup and kitchen materials behind us while we’re sorting through deliveries.

The kitchen has also been able to produce a lot more soups and meals with more storage. Change can be difficult, but I’m glad La Soupe has its employees' best interests in mind. At the end of the day, we’re here to provide quality, fresh food to communities where fresh food is hard to come by and we cannot forget that.