One Million Hot Meals a Day for Gaza
Summary
In 2025, World Central Kitchen (WCK) committed to producing and delivering one million hot meals per day to communities in Gaza until the end of 2026. As the humanitarian situation grows more critical, WCK will use a scalable, community-based, multi-modality food response operation to urgently meet the humanitarian needs of the civilian Gaza population. WCK will leverage a diversified cooking network that includes: five High-Capacity WCK Kitchens; community kitchens, utilizing proven, trusted, and capable partners; restaurant partners; and bakeries, including mobile bakeries and bread trucks. By working with community kitchens, WCK will support the rebuilding of local food infrastructure while having the ability to rapidly scale-up when needed and maintain operational flexibility. This bold commitment addresses the urgent needs and famine in Gaza, delivering meals with dignity to communities.
Approach
To help address this problem, World Central Kitchen (WCK) will produce and deliver one million hot meals per day to communities in Gaza through a scalable, community-based, multi-modality food response operation, designed to urgently meet the humanitarian needs of the civilian Gaza population. WCK will achieve this target by leveraging a diversified cooking network that includes, among other things: Five high-capacity WCK kitchens, including the possibility, where absolutely necessary, of semi-pasteurized cooking within Israel from secure areas for subsequent distribution in other parts of Gaza; community kitchens, utilizing proven, trusted and capable partners; restaurant partners; and bakeries, including three mobile bakeries/bread trucks.
This approach has a proven track record. WCK’s kitchen network in Gaza formerly produced 300,000 meals per day before some of its kitchens were destroyed or rendered inaccessible, and they will build out this proven network to scale up to one million per day.
Through its use of community kitchens, this model begins to rebuild the local food infrastructure. It also allows rapid scale-up and operational flexibility by offering meals through varying combinations of WCK high-capacity kitchens, restaurant partners, community kitchens and pre-packaged meal kits as circumstances permit. This modality is open to participation by other NGOs.
Action Plan
To meet the one million meal target, WCK will implement the following scale-up plan: (i) WCK will use Field Kitchens to target 400,000 meals a day from 5 facilities; (ii) WCK will support Community Kitchens to target 300,000 meals a day from about 100 locations; (iii) Restaurant Partners would produce 100,000 meals a day; (iv) Bakeries would produce 100,000 meals a day; and (v) WCK will initially deliver 100,000 Ready to Eat Meals and kits per day.
This plan will scale up over time as additional trucking resources become available and more kitchens come online.
Background
World Central Kitchen (WCK) has been actively feeding people in Gaza since the beginning of the present war there. In recent months, however, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has grown to its most critical state to date. The population, particularly in the North, is suffering from a chronic shortage of food caused by ongoing warfare, looting, and profiteering, all of which have impacted the ability of WCK and other organizations to deliver food safely to their kitchens and warehouses.