Founded in 2012, Teen Kitchen Project has engaged over 1,200 youth in preparing healthy meals delivered to people living with critical and chronic illness. To date, Teen Kitchen Project volunteer drivers have delivered over 500,000 meals. 

There is a new medically tailored meal benefit in California’s Medi-Cal health care program. Teen Kitchen Project meals have scaled up to meet increased demand from this program. To keep up with the demand for our services, we need facilities that can allow us to exceed our current production capacity of 100,000 meals annually.  Our current kitchen presents significant instability and risk to the organization as it is a “rented by the hour” use agreement, offering no security for the long term growth we are facing. We cannot continue to expand without a larger, updated kitchen that includes new, larger capacity equipment and more refrigeration to hold our freshly prepared meals for delivery. 

A new, larger kitchen will also enable us to scale our program of engaging youth as it is in central Santa Cruz County. 

Teen Kitchen Project’s new home consolidates our existing kitchen and office sites into a single, centralized, more efficient campus which will support expanded nutrition and culinary education for clients and the community. 

Our new location is in Soquel, less than a one-minute drive from our current kitchen.