Helping Harvest Community Kitchen – Opened April 2025
Our City Reading Partnership Project
Helping Harvest Community Kitchen
229 Washington Street, Reading, PA
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.
2025 By the Numbers – Helping Harvest Community Kitchen
Meet Our Culinary Team
(L to R) Chef Melanie Galarza, Director of Culinary Operations; Chef Christopher Kochel, Assistant Production Chef; and Chef George Adams, Production Chef