Community leaders, elected officials and supporters gathered Thursday as Prodisee Pantry broke ground on Prodisee Pantry North, a new food pantry and resource center that will bring permanent food distribution and support services to rural North Baldwin County. The estimated $3.8 million facility will be built on 4.5 acres donated by the Baldwin County Commission earlier this year. Mobile-based White-Spunner Construction will serve as general contractor, with completion expected in June 2027.
“For 23 years, families in North Baldwin County have had to drive up to 40 miles just to reach us in Spanish Fort. This groundbreaking means we can finally bring healthy food and the resources that go with it directly to the communities that need them most,” said Deann Servos, executive director of Prodisee Pantry.
The 8,000-square-foot facility will include two loading docks, a walk-in freezer and cooler, a 3,400-square-foot food warehouse, office and clinic space, a 3,400-square-foot community room and 150 parking spaces to accommodate high-volume distribution days. According to Prodisee Pantry, the Stockton location will mirror the weekly food distributions and supportive services currently offered at its Spanish Fort headquarters, with local healthcare and social service providers committing to legal, medical, dental and financial counseling on-site.
A Quarter-Century of Need Meets a Permanent Answer
“White-Spunner Construction is honored to build a project that will serve North Baldwin families for generations. This is exactly the kind of work our team is proud to take on, and we’re grateful Prodisee Pantry trusted us to bring their vision for this community to life,” said John White-Spunner, chief executive officer of White-Spunner Construction.
Prodisee Pantry served 11,102 families across Baldwin County in 2025, including 4,663 families in North Baldwin County, distributing more than $2.7 million worth of food, according to the organization. Since its first food distribution in November 2003, the nonprofit says it has served 236,169 families, including 99,191 in North Baldwin County. Approximately 42 percent of its client families live in the rural communities the new Stockton facility is intended to serve.
Those numbers describe the problem in plain terms: more than four in ten of the families Prodisee Pantry helps live north of where the pantry’s shelves have stood for two decades. For a family in Stockton, Pine Grove, or the smaller crossroads communities along the northern county line, a trip to Spanish Fort for groceries meant a drive that could consume an hour each way, plus the fuel cost — a meaningful barrier for households where the budget is already stretched thin.
Why Rural Baldwin County Needed Its Own Pantry
North Baldwin County is the county’s quiet half: farmland, timberland, small towns like Bay Minette and Stockton, and long stretches of two-lane road between them. Its rural character also means fewer grocery stores, fewer social services, and less public transportation than the fast-growing coastal strip to the south. Food banks across the country have long identified rural counties as the hardest to serve for exactly this reason — the need is dispersed, the distances are long, and the logistics of moving fresh food multiply with every mile.
The Stockton site answers those challenges with scale. Two loading docks mean the facility can accept full truckloads of donated and purchased food rather than partial deliveries; the walk-in freezer and cooler allow the pantry to handle protein and produce, the most expensive and most requested items on any food bank’s list; and 150 parking spaces are sized for the distribution days when hundreds of families arrive in a single morning. The community room creates space for the services that ride alongside food assistance — the counseling, the applications, the referrals that turn a bag of groceries into a bridge back to stability.
Bringing health and social service providers on-site reflects a model that food banks nationwide have adopted as they have evolved beyond emergency groceries. A family that visits a pantry once a month is a family a caseworker can reach; locating legal aid, medical screening, dental care or financial counseling in the same building multiplies the value of every visit and catches problems — an unpaid utility bill, a missed benefits application, an untreated condition — before they become crises.
What Happens Between Now and 2027
Construction managed by White-Spunner, a firm with a long track record of commercial and institutional projects across the central Gulf Coast, is expected to run into 2027, and the pantry will continue its Spanish Fort operations without interruption in the meantime. The Baldwin County Commission’s land donation removed one of the largest costs a rural facility faces, and the county’s investment signals the project’s standing as public infrastructure in the eyes of local government.
Prodisee Pantry began in 2003 as an extension of community outreach and has grown into one of Baldwin County’s primary emergency food providers, operating weekly distributions that combine USDA commodities, donated goods and purchased food. Its leadership has framed the North Baldwin expansion as the organization’s most significant capital project since its founding — a step from serving the county from one corner of it to standing in both.
For the families who currently make the long drive south, the change will eventually be measured in miles and minutes: the 40-mile round trip Servos described becomes a short drive to Stockton. For the volunteers, donors and partner churches that sustain the pantry’s work, the groundbreaking marks the start of a fundraising and building period with a concrete finish line in June 2027. And for North Baldwin County, the sight of loading docks rising on a donated 4.5 acres means the kind of help that has required a half-day’s travel will soon be close to home.
The project also fits the county’s broader push to extend services into its rural reaches. Baldwin County’s population growth has been concentrated along the I-10 corridor and the beach communities, but the northern half of the county has its own needs — aging populations, pockets of deep poverty, and limited access to the safety-net programs that urban residents can reach by bus. County officials have increasingly treated food access as part of that equation, and the land donation is the commission’s most visible contribution to it.
Stockton sits at the crossroads of the routes that connect North Baldwin’s small communities, making it a practical hub for a facility meant to serve the whole region. Families from Bay Minette, Perdido, Little River and the communities along the Mobile-Tensaw delta edge can all reach it without crossing the county, and the site’s size leaves room for the kind of growth — additional partner services, expanded distribution days — that the pantry expects once the doors open.
Until then, the numbers that motivated the project keep climbing. Every year between now and the June 2027 opening is another year of families driving 40 miles for groceries, and the pantry’s Spanish Fort distribution lines will keep running for them. The groundbreaking is the beginning of the end of that drive — and for the 42 percent of client families living in rural North Baldwin, the shovel-ready acres in Stockton represent the difference between help that is far away and help that is home.
The economics of food assistance explain why the facility’s specifications look the way they do. A walk-in freezer and cooler change what a pantry can accept: a load of frozen chicken or a pallet of fresh produce that would spoil in a dry warehouse becomes storable inventory, and Feeding America-type networks move surplus food to whichever partner can take it cold. Two loading docks let a truck unload while another is scheduled, keeping donated product moving rather than idling in a trailer. For a distribution operation that moved more than $2.7 million of food in a single year, infrastructure is not a luxury — it is the difference between what can be said yes to and what must be declined.
The 150-space parking plan speaks to how a pantry day actually runs. High-volume distributions are logistical events: cars line up before dawn, volunteers direct traffic, and hundreds of households are served in a few hours. A site that cannot park the queue sends cars onto the roadway, which is both a safety problem and a public relations problem with the neighbors. Sizing the lot for the busiest day of the year, rather than the average one, is the detail that separates a facility that works from one that immediately needs relief.
The on-site clinic and office space also positions the pantry for the kind of partnerships that have reshaped food banks over the past two decades. Healthcare providers increasingly screen patients for food insecurity and refer them to pantry programs; conversely, pantries that host health screenings catch diabetes and hypertension in populations that rarely see a doctor. Legal aid clinics at food pantries help clients with benefits appeals, expungements and housing disputes — the paperwork problems that often underlie a family’s trip to the food line in the first place. Every one of those services requires a room, and the Stockton facility plans for them from the blueprint stage.
For now, Thursday’s ceremony was the milestone that turns a plan into a project: shovels in a donated field, a contractor under agreement, a completion date on the calendar. The work between now and June 2027 — fundraising, construction, hiring, outfitting the warehouse, building the volunteer corps that every distribution day depends on — remains ahead. But North Baldwin County has waited 23 years for a food pantry of its own, and as of this week, the waiting has a scheduled end.