Help WCK Scale Up to 1 Million Meals a Day in Gaza

World Central Kitchen (WCK) is first to the frontlines providing meals in response to climate, humanitarian, and community crises. Applying our model of quick action, leveraging local resources, and adapting in real time, our Relief Teams have served more than 600 million nourishing meals around the world. On behalf of the entire team at WCK, we are extremely grateful for your support, and we hope you share our pride in all that we have accomplished together.

WCK has been supporting communities affected by the ongoing crisis in the Middle East since October 2023. The most life-saving emergency response in our organization’s history, WCK’s locally-led Relief Teams have served more than 203 million nourishing meals to impacted families across Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and the West Bank. More than 182 million of the meals WCK has served to date have been distributed to Palestinian families in Gaza where food shortages are most severe. To do so, WCK has:

• Created a strong network of large-scale WCK Field Kitchens and smaller-scale community kitchens spread across Gaza. Currently, 65+ community kitchens and six Field Kitchens are cooking hundreds of thousands of meals daily. Our most recently opened kitchen is our second in northern Gaza, and is capable of producing around 150,000 meals daily. 
• Established a resilient team of local Palestinians, each of whom has been directly affected by the conflict. WCK’s neighbors-supporting-neighbors strategy ensures our meals are culturally relevant, our operations are locally informed, and our trust with the community stays strong.
• Dispatched nearly 4,850 truckloads of food products, baby formula, kitchen equipment, and more across multiple border points, increasing the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza while minimizing the risk of encountering a bottleneck of utilizing just a single crossing. 
• Launched our first ever mobile bakery, donated by the Jordanian royal family. The truck has provided critically needed nutrition in the midst of evacuation orders. We have since added two new mobile bakeries, each with the capacity to produce over 70,000 loaves of bread daily.
• Undertaken special projects to provide holistic support that build on our meal efforts, like serving hospitals and children's events and providing kitchen supplies locally. These efforts are featured in this video. WCK has also provided baby formula, protein bars, and other supplies that have been inaccessible in Gaza. In early October, WCK teams were able to distribute fresh fruit in Gaza for the first time in months, delivering thousands of apples, oranges, and bananas to hospitals, schools, and communities in need.

Currently, World Central Kitchen is distributing more than 700,000 meals a day in Gaza through six large-scale kitchens, 65+ locally-led community kitchens, and a strong network of local restaurant partners. We are also baking 500,000+ loaves of bread through our mobile bakeries and local partners and distributing over 50,000 liters of fresh drinking water daily. In October, WCK opened two new kitchens in Gaza. The first of the new facilities was the Salam Kitchen (Arabic for peace) in Deir al-Balah. Alongside our existing Deir al-Balah Field Kitchen, this facility has significantly expanded our reach and impact in one of the most densely populated regions in Gaza where food and water needs are severe. In Mawasi, the Hayat Kitchen (Arabic for life), is the largest facility WCK has ever built, an unprecedented hub for frontline relief. Most recently, our teams completed the opening of two additional Field Kitchens in northern Gaza, capable of producing over 100,000 meals a day. The construction of our new kitchens in the midst of widespread destruction and chaos has served as a beacon of hope for local communities, and each facility plays a vital role in moving WCK closer to serving one million hot meals every day in Gaza.

According to an emailed report from the Food Security Cluster, World Central Kitchen is responsible for more than 50% of all humanitarian partners’ combined meal productions in Gaza, and our teams are ready to do so much more. As we continue to scale up our capacity, WCK is committed to supporting communities affected by the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East for as long as we are needed. Thank you again for your help—we are so grateful for your support of our critical relief efforts in Gaza. 

Links:

• WCK's newest Field Kitchen in Northern Gaza
• Special WCK projects in Gaza
• Fresh meat served in Gaza after months of waiting