Case Study: World Central Kitchen achieves delivery of over 30 million meals to frontline workers with Airtable

How one team delivered over 30 million meals to the front lines

World Central Kitchen, founded by Chef José Andrés, turned to Airtable as the COVID-19 crisis exploded and volunteer efforts like Frontline Foods ballooned. Faced with hundreds of dispersed chapters that needed to self-organize, manage budgets, coordinate complex deliveries, and hire local restaurants, WCK found document-based tools too slow and cumbersome and sought a simple, fast platform to scale operations.

Using Airtable — including Custom Apps, Scripting, Automations, and the Map app — World Central Kitchen and Frontline Foods built Backline and a Capacity Planning app to automate recurring orders, match supply with restaurant capacity, and visualize deliveries. The result: World Central Kitchen scaled rapidly with Airtable, delivering over 30 million meals, purchasing more than $100M in meals from thousands of restaurants across 400+ cities, and streamlining decision-making across multiple disaster responses.

World Central Kitchen

Josh Balser

Director of Relief Systems