Meal kits to combat food insecurity

The Community Gourmet is a grass-roots effort to address food insecurity in Southern Maine.  Our concept is to help people who utilize food pantries learn how to use the vegetables and proteins available to them along with the food that we donate (non perishable food items) by teaching them how to use the products to create healthy and delicious food.  Our mission is nourishing, teaching, and caring.

Traci has extensive experience in cooking professionally as well as teaching college level culinary classes. She has also volunteered at food pantries. At the food pantries she has noticed that people often do not make the best use of vegetables and proteins offered because they may not know how to cook or how to incorporate the products received into meals, or do not have the necessary resources, i.e., cooking equipment. Traci started this organization with the hopes to bring as much knowledge into people's homes to teach them basic cooking skills.

Our mission is to provide staple pantry food items through donation . tWe go one step further and with our recipes, we tea how to use these items to create nutritious meals. By making food available, he hope to help people and to diminish the feelings of shame people experience when they need to obtain food from a pantry, and to make them feel empowered and confident.  

The way we’ve done this is to create a meal kit.  Our initial offering was a box with two boxes of pasta, a can of tomato sauce and Parmesan, for a spaghetti meal and mayonnaise, to create a pasta salad with vegetables from the pantry.  We also offer a soup and salad kit, ramen noodle kit and a fajita kit.
Each kit includes the items above, as well as recipes to create the meals using  the foods we

 We provide in each reusable bag, as well as recipes with suggestions for augmenting the kit with other ingredients typically available at our local food pantries.    Each kit also includes a basic kitchen tool, such as measuring cups and spoons, cutting boards, colanders, kitchen towels, etc., which are intended to help people learn basic cooking skills. Our recipes are easy to follow and flexible to accommodate any lifestyle.

Our Care Packages are created for the seniors in our community. They contain small meals like tunafish snack packs, beef stew, soup, breakfast items like oatmeal, cereal, dry milk, applesauce, fruit cups and snacks like Lorna Doones, fig Newtons, tea, coffee and hot choclate. There are 20 items in total to help them get through the week. These are delivered by local law enforcement, food pantries, senior centers and senior education programs.

We’ve distributed 4000+ kits and Care Packages since we began in late January of 2022.  We want to be able to do more kits each week and work with agencies that have direct contact with anyone experiencing food insecurities.

Our primary fundraising to date has been through the sale of raspberry linzer cookies, which we bake in a borrowed commercial kitchen.  We’ve held fundraising cookie sales (for a suggested donation of $15) for both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and “Christmas in July,” baking between 35 and 45 dozen cookies for each event.  

We are a  501(c)3 designation as a nonprofit organization.  Our endeavor has been featured in Seacoast Online (https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/2022/06/16/community-gourmet-feeding-hungry-one-meal-kit-time/7570811001/) and the Kennebunk Post (https://www.pressherald.com/2022/06/16/cookies-for-fathers-day-yields-meal-kits-for-food-pantries/), as well as a feature on “Mainers Making a Difference” (https://wgme.com/features/mainers-making-a-difference/the-community-gourmet-helps-teach-york-county-how-to-cook)
Thank you,

Traci