New BrunswickEvelyn McNulty is excited to stack the “shiny” shelves in Romero House’s new storage room. The Saint John soup kitchen has just cut the ribbon on the expansion.Expansion will allow Romero House to keep fresh vegetables longer, stay better organized Isabelle Leger · CBC News · Posted: Oct 05, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 8 hours agoElizabeth McNulty, the Romero House executive director, and Clow Canada’s Rick Benoit cut the ribbon on the soup kitchen’s new storage and cold room expansion. (Submitted by Evelyn McNulty)Organizing and stocking shelves may not be the definition of fun for most people, but Evelyn McNulty can hardly wait to stock the “shiny” new storage room recently given to Saint John’s Romero House. The Saint John soup kitchen, which serves meals every day of the year to about 500 people from a building on Brunswick Drive, has cut the ribbon of its new storage and cold room expansion. “The addition is absolutely fantastic,” McNulty, the Romero House executive director, told Information Morning Saint John. Until now, Romero House has used an upstairs room for storage. The space had no shelving, but rather milk crates all stacked on each other, and boxes of food pushed up against the walls. “Which of course would make it logistically really hard to organize things, keep things coming in and coming out the way they should be,” McNulty said. “With the tremendous amount of meals that we serve, it just added an extra challenge to what was already a very challenging job.” LISTEN | Soup kitchen director expresses excitment over storage room expansion: Information Morning – Saint John8:04Romero House expandsThe Saint John soup kitchen Romero House has expanded. Executive director, Evelyn McNulty joins host Emily Brass to talk about new storage space and cold room and why they were so badly needed.The expansion includes a storage room and cold room located on the ground floor, each lined with new shelving. McNulty said the cold room will allow Romero House to store and maintain fresh vegetables longer, rather than needing to quickly freeze them. The new storage room at Romero House is on the ground floor of the Saint John building, which McNulty says will make preparing meals much more efficient. (Submitted by Evelyn McNulty)She said having storage located on the ground floor will also make serving people much easier, because hauling heavy crates of food up and down flights of stairs is no longer needed. “It’s really an amazing thing, and it was the last thing on my mom’s list that she wanted to accomplish to make sure that the soup kitchen was secure for the future,” said McNulty, whose mother, Carolyn McNulty, started Romero House in 1982. McNulty said the team at Romero House is still deciding what to do with the now vacant space previously used for storage. That decision will be made throughout the winter, as they determine how it can best support the needs of the community. “The soup kitchen in the past has had a legal centre, a medical clinic and so something will speak to us, whether that’s a clothing room again or one that looks different or whether there’s something else we could offer,” she said. The storage expansion was donated by Clow Canada.ABOUT THE AUTHORIsabelle Leger is a reporter based in Fredericton. You can reach her at isabelle.leger@cbc.caWith files from Information Morning Saint John
Longtime Saint John soup kitchen finally gets practical space to store food
