Springfield Culinary and Nutrition Center
June 14th, 2022
When an entire city, school district, and an international food services management company come together with the shared mission to eliminate student hunger, you can imagine the lofty construction plans it entailed. The site for those plans, however, wasn’t quite to scale. So with a big ambition having to fit a small blueprint, EDM had to think outside the box in all new ways. And in the end, the outcome was just as momentous as the intention behind it.
The partnership between the city of Springfield, MA, the school district, and Sodexo USA (a food and facilities management group) was the very first of its kind in the United States. And out of it came the $21 million plan to transform a 62,000 sq. ft. building into a state-of-the-art culinary and nutrition center that would be used for daily food preparation for over 30,000 Springfield Public Schools students, while also creating over 300 new employment opportunities within the community with a 70% poverty rate.
The existing building was previously used by three different tenants, and included offices and a large warehouse, so the first step was gutting the entire building to start from scratch. And while converting the office space into an area for the chefs and kitchen support staff was a fairly standard process, the warehouse was a different story.
Chris Wante, Project Architect
“The biggest challenge was taking a warehouse with zero infrastructure and revamping it into a massive, modern kitchen facility,” Chris Wante, EDM Project Architect, explained. “We had to transform every aspect of the structure to accommodate highly-specialized cooking systems and top-of-the-line equipment and technology. That meant building out all the plumbing, electrical, and gas, as well as installing large refrigeration and freezer units that took up a quarter of the warehouse. We have done a ton of commercial kitchens in the past, but nothing to this size or scale.”
But EDM is never a team to back away from a challenge — instead, it’s when our strengths really shine through. And in this case, it was teamwork. “This project really showcased our capabilities as an AE firm,” Chris shared. “Typically, our focus will be split 50/50 between architecture and engineering, but on this project, the work was evenly distributed throughout all of our disciplines — from mechanical, structural, architectural, and electrical — and it truly was a team effort.”
And that also included recognizing the areas where the team needed help. “Being such a unique culinary project, we hired a kitchen consultant, John Sousa, who understood the nuances of these cutting-edge kitchen equipment and technologies to help us understand what needed to be done,” Chris added. “He was a fantastic partner through all the hurdles we had to face, and we now have an invaluable ally in our corner for these types of projects moving forward."
And while you’d think the intensive infrastructure undertaking and a kitchen of that scale would each be enough of a challenge for one project, the space constraints added another layer of complication for all parties involved. “The site was very small for all the elements that needed to go into it,” Chris explained. “That included everything from air conditioning to refrigeration to even parking.” And since this facility is not only serving schools and parishes throughout Springfield, but also first responders in the event of an emergency, the city also required backup power. We had to figure out how to incorporate three massive generators without the space for them. So we got creative and utilized the roof for a lot of the HVAC equipment, which required beefing up the internal beams and columns to hold everything. Basically, we were rebuilding the building from the inside out.”
But what started as an obstacle turned into a major triumph for the EDM team. So much so that they were awarded for their innovative use of generators by the Generac manufacturing brand and recognized in person at their Annual Engineering Power Symposium.
In the end, a project with extraordinary challenges and tasks came to fruition thanks to tried-and-true teamwork. The one-of-a-kind facility allows Springfield to be the first district to offer breakfast in the classroom for students and provide second-to-none meals for those in need. And like the opportunity it now brings the community, it will certainly do the same for the EDM team. “This project has more than prepared us to provide commercial clients on any scale with kitchen expertise,” Chris shared. “We learned a ton about the ways in which all the disciplines can work collaboratively and how all the pieces come together. From every perspective, we can leverage this experience to offer our clients a level of service we never could before.”
