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In 2025, DC Central Kitchen was open every single day because of you. In fact, each morning since our founding on January 20, 1989, we have opened our doors, fired up our stoves, and served our city. Blizzards, ice storms, inaugural road closures, government shutdowns, even a global pandemic—we never close, and we never miss a meal.
But staying open isn’t just a matter of continuous operations. It means our staff must be ready to pursue new opportunities and take bold risks in service of our mission. It means our culinary students must be willing to embrace change and leave old ways behind.
Staying open means being transparent about the values we hold dear and the impact we generate with your support. It also means welcoming everyone who is part of the community we love and treating them with respect and sincerity.
At DC Central Kitchen, we are always open.
Open to growth. Open to innovation. Open to all our neighbors. And we’re open when it matters most.
As you review this annual report, I hope you are encouraged by the progress and success you made possible at an especially difficult time for our nation’s capital.
Thank you for being a DC Central Kitchen supporter.
Mike Curtin, Jr. CEO & 21-year employee
In just our second full year of operations at our new 36,000 sq. ft. headquarters, we continued our trajectory of doubling nearly every aspect of our work. Our Culinary Job Training program enhanced its curriculum by adding two weeks of intensive life skills and job retention lessons and offered another specialized course for empowered mothers—job-seeking single mothers with dependent children. Our 161 annual graduates have launched their new careers at respected industry partners like José Andrés Group, Marriott International, Hilton, Starbucks, Green Island Bakery, and Daily Provisions.
Our Community Meals program continued growing its new home-delivered meals service for food insecure seniors as we marked the 100,000th meal served via our innovative partnership with DoorDash. We also expanded this dynamic model to include dozens of mobility challenged veterans who had fallen through the cracks of other services. We further extended our hunger-fighting reach through strategic partnerships, working with DC Food Project to establish and stock ten more school-based food pantries and helping two of DC’s urban farms install the cold storage units they needed to grow more healthy crops and accept deliveries of our meals for food insecure neighbors.
To keep pace with rising needs, we added even more weekly volunteer shifts to our bustling operation, allowing us to host more than 19,000 volunteers in 2025!
For far too many people, healthy, affordable food can be hard to find. Our Healthy Corners program is a nationally recognized solution to that problem, creatively bringing fresh fruits and vegetables, infrastructure, and training to small corner stores in DC neighborhoods without supermarkets. This program faced major external changes this year, and responded on the fly with innovative adjustments that made it easier than ever for 27,000 low-income shoppers to afford nutritious produce. In addition to making our acclaimed ‘SNAP Match’ service accessible to more customers and opening Ward 8’s newest fully-fledged produce department at a leading corner store partner, Healthy Corners teamed up with George Washington University’s Global Food Institute to create a new in-depth manual for other groups looking to replicate Healthy Corners’ success. That resource is now available for free on our website.
To stretch our donors’ generous gifts, we worked tirelessly to earn our own sustainable revenue as well. Our Healthy School Food program now dishes out 12,000 meals a day at 30 public, charter, and private schools, serving scratch-cooked, locally sourced meals to 7,000 food insecure children throughout the year while creating good jobs for our culinary graduates. This year, our meals earned a 92% satisfaction rating among DC public schoolchildren while our healthy summer meals for kids earned the US Department of Agriculture’s highest Gold Level recognition for nutrition and quality.
Our three DC Central Kitchen Cafe locations across the city allow us to train and employ more culinary students, sell delicious local items, and create welcoming spaces in diverse neighborhoods, including downtown DC where we operate a cafe in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library. This winter, in response to the increased challenges facing our homeless neighbors, we partnered with DC Public Library to begin providing free takeaway meals and social program referrals to library visitors in the most difficult circumstances.
Throughout 2025, our cafes offered 50% discounts to any federal workers and contractors impacted by furloughs, shutdowns, or layoffs. And now included in our cafe inventory are desserts from Sunflower Bakery, a hospitality and pastry arts training program for teens and young adults with learning differences.
This year, more than 1,100 visitors from across the country and around the world sought us out for knowledge sharing activities—tours, consultations, and observations we offer for free to partner nonprofits, aspiring entrepreneurs, academic researchers, and student groups. We were proud to host in-depth exchanges and learning opportunities for peer organizations from places like: Athens, Greece; València, Spain; Louisville, Kentucky; Detroit, Michigan; Seattle, Washington; and Clarksdale, Mississippi.
When we marked our 37th anniversary on January 20, 2026, there weren’t any balloons or confetti. We cooked, we served, we trained, and we stuck to our core values, just like we had without fail for 13,514 consecutive days. If we don’t work, our neighbors don’t eat, and if we don’t show up when it’s hard, we can’t model what a better community can look like.
In the wee hours of January 30, 2025, our early morning staff arrived to find our headquarters on lockdown, as first responders had swarmed to Buzzard Point in the aftermath of the tragic midair collision at Washington National Airport. First, we focused on how to bring healthy school breakfasts to 7,000 children from our building inside an unexpected security perimeter. Then, we turned to feeding those same first responders, a solemn duty we carried out for nearly two weeks throughout the recovery and clean-up process.
As the end of 2025 approached, we responded with our largest Thanksgiving effort ever—serving 37,000 of our hungry neighbors. When food banks across the country were struggling to keep pace with rising needs, your support allowed us to efficiently provide turkeys, holiday dishes, and staples where they were needed most.
~Robert Egger DC Central Kitchen Founder
~Terrence. CJT Class 170 graduate
DC Central Kitchen is grateful for the thousands of financial supporters, partners, and volunteers who make our work possible every year through their generous gifts of time and resources. We are honored to recognize many of these contributions in our 2024 donor list. Donor lists for the current fiscal year of 2025 will appear in the corresponding annual report, which will be available in the Spring of 2026.
