Met Council opens a $25 million food bank warehouse in Canarsie, with an online-order pantry for neighbors

Canarsie is now home to the main distribution hub of the country's largest kosher food bank. Met Council, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, opened a $25 million warehouse and conference center at 5361 Preston Court on Monday, Oct. 26, BK Reader reported. More than 20 elected officials and 200 community leaders attended, according to The Jewish Star, whose report Met Council reposted.

The 22,000-square-foot building is the largest capital project in the group's 54-year history and gives its food operation a permanent home. It will supply Met Council's 344 pantry partners with kosher and halal food, which the group says can feed up to 1 million New Yorkers.

A pantry where you choose

The building includes a digital food pantry for Canarsie, a neighborhood where fresh, affordable groceries can be hard to find. Instead of lining up for a pre-packed bag, residents order online, choosing from produce, proteins, dairy and pantry staples, including kosher and halal items, and then pick up their order at the facility. Met Council says the approach means shorter waits and less waste; UJA-Federation of New York funded the digital pantry, The Jewish Star reported.

What the warehouse does

• Storage and tech: more cold storage, modern racking, barcode scanning, real-time inventory tracking, route optimization and AI tools to forecast demand, which Met Council says will help get fresh food to pantries faster.
• Scale: Met Council distributed more than 20 million pounds of food in fiscal year 2026 and reaches about 350,000 New Yorkers a year, including families, seniors and Holocaust survivors.
• Other programs: medically tailored meals and groceries for eligible Medicaid members through New York's Social Care Network, a National School Lunch Program serving 144 schools, home deliveries to Holocaust survivors and homebound seniors, and mobile pantries.
• Meeting space: the Jewish Communal Fund Conference Center, for trainings and meetings with pantry partners, nonprofits and government agencies.

City, state, federal and private money paid for the project, including a $1 million state matching grant secured by state Sen. Sam Sutton that donors and board members matched, The Jewish Star reported. "We built this warehouse because the need keeps growing," CEO David G. Greenfield said at the opening.

The site was already partly in use: construction firm Archstone Builders says phase one of the renovation was finished in November 2025, and the warehouse kept operating during the build-out, Hoodline noted.