Growing the Value of Teaching Kitchens to Promote Healthy Cooking and Lifestyle Behaviors

Teaching Kitchen Collaborative (TKC) advances Food is Medicine (FIM) efforts by bringing teaching kitchens together. The collaborative is far greater than the sum of its members which include 67 Organization Members and more than 260 Professional Members. TKC’s impact extends beyond its national and international member kitchens because it provides a conduit for members to learn from each other, leverage capabilities and resources, and generate a community of evidence and tools to objectively show stakeholders that FIM interventions can be transformative. 

TKC was included in the Bright Spots series to highlight an organization that facilitates knowledge of how nutrition affects health by engaging people and their communities through dynamic communication and tailored messaging. 

Teaching kitchens offer in-person and virtual experiential learning in healthy cooking techniques with the goal of instilling behavior change that improves diet quality and reduces the risk of diet-related diseases. In addition to cooking skills, many teaching kitchens also educate the public about self-care topics including nutrition, mindfulness, physical activity, and environmental sustainability to foster a holistic sense of well-being and support long-term behavior change. 

TKC’s members are as diverse as the populations and regions they serve, such as a rural kitchen in a southwestern Texas medical center, a 2,300-square-foot state-of-the-art facility at a university in Ohio, a kitchen in a Philadelphia public library, and a kitchen within a German sports park operated in partnership with a university. 

Many TKC members partner with federal food programs such as SNAP, SNAP-Ed, and WIC, or collaborate with clinics that already have a food pantry and/or produce prescription programs. TKC members are typically managed by teams of medical doctors, registered dietitians, and chefs who are aligned in their belief that skills enhancement and behavior change are essential to the long-term success of FIM interventions.

TKC was created by leaders at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Nutrition and The Culinary Institute of America in 2016 to bring together teaching kitchen pioneers who understood the key role that hands-on nutrition education plays in the success of all FIM interventions. 

Its founders also recognized that the community was fragmented and that teaching kitchens vary widely in their service delivery, access to resources, patient demographics, and performance metrics. They saw an opportunity to create a platform to share best practices, collaborate across teaching kitchen programs and initiatives, and keep each other informed about relevant programs and policies.

Facilitating Knowledge Exchange to Advance Teaching Kitchens

TKC helps teaching kitchens work together to advance their operations and impact. The Collaborative achieves this through activities promoting networking and information sharing via its annual conferences, virtual meetings, and active TKC committee work. 

TKC provides a space for members to share resources, findings, problem solutions, and best practices through its member portal, and it shares member spotlights, job postings, upcoming events, and resources through its email listserv and newsletter. 

Resources include a robust recipe library, regular webinars on relevant teaching kitchen topics, toolkits for setting up a teaching kitchen, and access to researchers and experts in state and federal food programs.

Promoting Effectiveness Research About the Impact of Teaching Kitchens

A major challenge for teaching kitchens is the lack of extensive research evaluating their impact on changes in participant knowledge, skills, behaviors, health outcomes, health care savings, health equity, and other outcomes, as well as how teaching kitchens impact other FIM interventions. This challenge is a major bottleneck for justifying insurance reimbursement, among other payment models for participation in teaching kitchen programs. 

To address this challenge, TKC’s Research Committee identifies and promotes new research opportunities across the Collaborative. A major TKC initiative is a multi-site research trial, funded by TKC, to determine how feasible, acceptable, and effective an intensive teaching kitchen intervention is on adults with clinically defined obesity and an additional metabolic syndrome component. 

In addition, TKC also helps members formulate new research ideas, conduct studies, analyze data, and write manuscripts to disseminate the efficacy and outcomes of their programs. This research support function is especially valuable for members without academic trial design and management expertise but who still need to rigorously evaluate outcomes for their programs.  

Informing Funding Opportunities for Teaching Kitchens

Most teaching kitchens are funded by private philanthropy, but other funding sources are becoming more common, including participant dues and fees, institutional grants, internal funding mechanisms, corporate sponsorships, and insurance reimbursement through private insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. 

Moreover, shared medical appointments have emerged as a way to integrate culinary skills and nutrition education into primary care. TKC shares information about funding opportunities and also aims to justify increased insurance coverage for teaching kitchens through its multi-site research trial by generating outcome and efficacy data. 

TKC is leading national efforts to assess programs, track outcomes, promote research, advocate for insurance and third-party reimbursements, and ultimately co-create standards for teaching kitchen programs across the United States. 

By growing TKC’s membership and strengthening channels for data and resource sharing, the TKC will help the field codify what a teaching kitchen is, how it works, and what common outcomes and metrics the FIM community should expect. Centralized data about teaching kitchens and codification will be especially valuable for promoting reimbursement and integration with medical care. 

One TKC resource is a toolkit that serves as a primer for setting up and operating a teaching kitchen program, providing guidance for aspiring teaching kitchen implementers. The toolkit acknowledges the diversity of teaching kitchens but generally recommends supporting hands-on instruction for groups of 20 or fewer participants and stocking kitchens with home equipment rather than commercial grade whenever possible. 

It also details different types of teaching kitchens — including modular/pop-up kitchens, pod or container kitchens, built-in kitchens, and virtual kitchens — and offers guidance on how implementers can choose the best kitchen based on their budget, available resources, and goals.