Bounty & Soul buys larger Black Mountain hub to expand food aid

Bounty & Soul has bought a 6,000-square-foot building across from its Black Mountain hub, a move driven by the sharp rise in food need after Hurricane Helene pushed the nonprofit from serving about 13,000 people a month to about 26,000.

The new space at 1035 Old U.S. 70 West will sit directly across from Bounty & Soul’s current Food, Education and Volunteer Hub. The organization said the larger building will double storage capacity and add refrigeration room, giving it more room to receive donated food, buy more when donations run short and keep pace with demand that remains elevated across Buncombe County.

That need is still visible in Swannanoa and beyond. Bounty & Soul said the storm left Swannanoa functioning like a food desert and made its markets the only reliable weekly source of fresh food for thousands of families. Local reporting has said the only grocery store in Swannanoa remained closed a year after Helene, leaving the nonprofit as one of the region’s most important stopgaps for fresh produce.

Bounty & Soul now runs 10 weekly markets across Buncombe County, and its Produce to the People page lists 12 locations. The markets offer more than produce. They include recipes, cooking demonstrations, healthy samples, children’s activities and access to local resources, giving residents a single place to pick up food and connect with other support.

The scale of its reach grew sharply after the storm. Spectrum News reported the group was serving about 26,000 people a month after Helene, up from about 13,000 before the disaster. WLOS reported Bounty & Soul reached more than 276,000 people in 2025, up from 158,000 the year before, and expanded from six weekly produce markets to 10 communities. One site at Rock Hill Missionary Baptist Church has drawn about 150 families each week.

The nonprofit also stepped deeply into emergency feeding. For several weeks after Helene, it said it provided 2,000 meals a day to 19 of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in Swannanoa, Black Mountain, Fairview and Old Fort. Buncombe County documents show it also reached 30,542 individuals in one reporting period through weekly markets, home delivery to more than 85 households and weekly delivery to four low-income neighborhoods.

The organization said Helene’s destruction of MANNA Food Bank cut donated food sharply in the final quarter of the year, forcing it to buy more food to bridge the gap. Funding for the new building came from a mix of foundations and donors, including the Wanda & Jim Moran Foundation, Publix Super Markets Charities, the Glass Foundation, the Cannon Foundation, Quility, the Swannanoa Valley Medical Center Foundation and the Forvis Mazars Foundation.

Bounty & Soul said the combined campus will total 16,800 square feet, though one donor campaign page described the future campus as 14,800 square feet. Either way, the expansion shows how a once-emergency response has become permanent infrastructure in a county where disaster recovery, high food costs and chronic food insecurity now overlap.