Food insecurity is on the rise in North Carolina. Nearly 14 percent of people in Durham County struggle with food insecurity, and between January 2024 and January 2025, SNAP participants had increased by 84,000 residents, according to state caseload data. This spike occurred shortly before President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, tightening parameters on SNAP eligibility and cutting off an estimated 2.4 million Americans from food aid.
One thing there isn’t a shortage of, though, is food waste: in 2023, there were over two million tons of food waste generated in North Carolina.
Both are problems that Michael Woods, the founder of Triangle Central Kitchen (TCK), is excited to tackle with his recently launched nonprofit.
“We are a nation that has the potential to solve our hunger crisis that hasn’t,” Woods stresses. “I don’t think too many people need to have it explained to them how dire the need is in this particular moment for work that touches at the intersection of hunger and poverty.”
TCK’s goal is to launch its first pilot training program in the summer of 2026.
A number of local organizations, including PORCH-Durham, Farmer Foodshare, and Durham Community Fridges, work to increase local food access. The problem, says Corey Williams, director of marketing at TCK, is scale.
“Feed-Well Fridges did about 6,000 meals last year,” she says, noting that while that’s a significant amount of food, it isn’t enough to solve the area’s deep hunger problem.
“A lot of our community partners are like that, where they’re able to do thousands of meals over a year,” Williams adds, “but we’re hoping that, by creating this central kitchen, we’re able to help everyone scale.”
TCK’s operations are modeled after the DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), a well-known nonprofit that prepared a staggering 3.9 million meals to help with food insecurity in the Washington area in 2024.
DCCK was founded in 1989 by Robert Egger, now a board member for TCK. Its premise, and TCK’s, is simple but powerful: use surplus food from farms and restaurants that would otherwise go to waste, prepare a large number of meals at a dedicated (central) kitchen every day, and distribute meals to those who need them.
But you need a big team to make thousands of meals a day, TCK’s ultimate distribution goal. To solve for this, the nonprofit says it will offer paid training programs for aspiring chefs, helmed by culinary director and local powerhouse chef Adé Carrena. These budding chefs will put their new skills to use by making all of the meals while they’re going through the program.
“We’re first and foremost a workforce development program,” explains Williams. “We’re focused on trying to get folks into careers that are sustainable and provide living wages.”
Training cohorts will complete a roughly 11-week training program and also have access to things like externship opportunities and job placement support.
TCK’s model is set up so that, ideally, everyone involved benefits: restaurants don’t have to throw out perfectly good ingredients, community members get fed, and people get set up for long-term career opportunities.
Right now, the nonprofit is busy fundraising and getting the word out about its mission. But it hasn’t been a hard sell to get chefs like Saltbox Seafood Joint’s Ricky Moore committed to helping the program succeed. Moore will serve as a board member as well as “culinary general,” according to Woods, a role the pair is still defining.
“I do want to always explore how I can help and how I can participate and effect some change in the community,” Moore says of his decision to become involved. “That’s what I’ve always done, and that’s what I’m always going to plan to do.”
“This work is truly needed now more than ever,” says Woods. “We’re certainly hoping to point a new way forward for how this work can be done with dignity and joy in the Triangle.”
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