World Central Kitchen launched it’s COVID relief effort in March by getting individually packaged meals to healthcare workers and people most in need in New York, Oakland, Little Rock, and Los Angeles. Thereafter, expanded quickly, and began partnering with small, local restaurants that were temporarily shuttered to prepare meals for their communities. The concept was simple, World Central Kitchen could pay out-of-work restaurants to cook meals for their neighbors in need of fresh food. World Central Kitchen then started the Restaurants for the People program, initially committing to purchase 1 million meals, putting $10 million directly back into local economies.
Nearly six months later, World Central Kitchen has purchased over 10 million meals from small, independent restaurants, funneling more than $105 million back into the economy. The restaurant meals have been delivered to families and individuals most in need of food through this pandemic.
Chef José Andrés, born and trained in Spain, moved to the US at age 21. He soon settled in Washington, DC, and began volunteering at DC Central Kitchen, which is a nationally recognized “community kitchen” that recycles food from around Washington, D.C., and uses it as a tool to train unemployed adults to develop work skills while providing thousands of meals for local service agencies in the process.
In 2010, the chef hopped on a plane to Haiti, which had just been struck by one of the most devastating natural disasters in human history. Over 300,000 people lost their lives in an earthquake, and hundreds of thousands more were left without homes, resources, electricity, communication lines, or roadways.
Andrés noticed that “we didn’t have organizations led by cooks the same way we had rebuilding organizations led by architects or health organizations led by doctors,” as he told Smithsonian Magazine. Chef José Andrés founded World Central Kitchen using his $50,000 prize money from the Vilcek Foundation, which he received for his outstanding contributions to America as an immigrant
