Community Kitchen
The Helping Harvest Community Kitchen is Helping Harvest’s second location (other than our warehouse at 117 Morgan Drive in Reading, PA). The Community Kitchen is located at 229 Washington Street in Reading, PA, adjacent to the Goggleworks Center for the Arts. Parking for the Community Kitchen can be found in the Goggleworks rear lot.
Construction on the Helping Harvest Community Kitchen, which includes a 7,000-square-foot commercial kitchen, began in May of 2024, with Helping Harvest moving in on April 20, 2025. The kitchen began producing heat-and-eat ready meals just two weeks later.
The kitchen’s culinary team includes chefs George Adams, Melanie Galarza, and Christopher Kochel. These culinary professionals develop menus based on available donated and purchased food products while supervising meal production, packaging, and our dedicated kitchen volunteers.
The kitchen features state-of-the-art cooking equipment and preparation stations, an expansive meal preparation area, multiple food storage areas for dry, refrigerated, and frozen products, two dedicated packaging lines, and flexible configuration to accommodate various program needs.
The facility also includes a large classroom/conference room with large windows looking into the kitchen, a smaller conference room, and 13 offices housing our chefs, development and marketing staff, Chief Food Sourcing Officer, programming staff, and client-facing staff, including our bilingual SNAP Outreach Coordinator.
The kitchen operates with two volunteer shifts daily, working alongside our chefs to prepare and package meals. In addition to the frozen heat-and-eat ready meals produced at the community kitchen, the culinary team and volunteers also work to repackage bulk food items into family-friendly portions and produce hot congregate meals for our agency partners to serve.
In the first year the kitchen was open, it produced over 170,000 meals. This included almost 15,000 Thanksgiving meals of smoked turkey breast, house made gravy, sweet potato mash, green beans and cranberry sauce.
Some of the menus produced have included a variety of soups such as cheesesteak potato soup and ham & bean soup, breakfast meals like biscuits and sausage gravy and French toast served with compound butter and sausage, vegetarian and vegan meals like pasta with mushroom bolognese and squash soup, and dinners like lasagna, shepherd’s pie, lemon chicken and tortellini, chicken parmesan, chicken fajitas and more. Most components of the dishes are made in-house, such as stocks, sauces and biscuits, and are made using a variety of donated products. The efforts at the kitchen would not be possible without our food donors and retail partners, which include farmers, food manufacturers, grocery stores and more.
Meet Our Culinary Team
Chef Melanie Galarza
Director of Culinary Operations
Chef Christopher Kochel
Assistant Production Chef
Chef George Adams
Production Chef