Touted as “the largest cookchill kitchen in the United States,” the Bobby Parham Kitchen soon will have a new tenant.
The Milledgeville City Council on Tuesday voted 4-0 to rezone the property, thus clearing the way for a new meat processing and meat preparation operation at the property.
The Parham Kitchen, located behind the Powell Building on Central State Hospital's campus, has been vacant since late 2024, when the previous tenant was evicted after not paying rent. It's a massive facility, clocking in at approximately 140,000 square feet. For many years, prior to the dismantling of state-run mental hospitals, thousands of meals were prepared each day there, and then shipped off to different mental hospitals and state prisons throughout Georgia. At the time, “60,000 eggs were cracked each morning.”
The new project is being led by Envar Taner Baltaci, a Turkish immigrant and Atlanta businessman with a background in natural and engineered stone sales and logistics. There will be “no slaughtering on the premises,” and the plan is for “meat processing, cold storage, packaging and wholesale distribution.'
Baltaci isn't promising to “bring hundreds of jobs to Baldwin County” like one of the previous tenants, Food Service Partners, and there won't be a big press conference. Food Service Partners began operating out of the Parham Kitchen in 2020 and celebrated the opening with a press conference. Gov. Brian Kemp was there, and Food Service Partners claimed it eventually would hire between 400 to 500 people.
However, that number never grew any higher than 75-80, and Food Service Partners eventually filed for bankruptcy and abandoned the facility in the summer of 2022 without paying its employees for their final few weeks of work.
A group called Peach State Kitchens then moved into the facility the following year. Peach State Kitchens quickly grew to roughly 70 employees and was preparing about 40,000 frozen meals per days. By October 2024, however, business had slowed and Peach State Kitchens was was evicted after falling several months behind on its $65,000 rent.
The facility is owned by the Central State Hospital Local Redevelopment Authority and its subsidiary, Georgia International Food Center, LLC.