Nonprofit adds a Mount Kisco location to combat hunger

The new commercial-grade kitchen in the Trinity Presbyterian Church where meals for Meals on Main St. will be prepared. MARTIN WILBUR PHOTO

By MARTIN WILBUR

A nonprofit that has made a major impact fighting hunger and food insecurity in southern Westchester has opened its second location in Mount Kisco.

Meals on Main St. unveiled its new space in the Trinity Presbyterian Church on Tuesday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It is the same spot that had been inhabited for many years by the Rippowam Cisqua School on West Patent Avenue, having taken over the kitchen and adjacent cafeteria.

Executive Director Jon Haseltine said the new facility will serve families that need help in the northern half of the county and portions of Putnam and Fairfield counties. Meals on Main St. has been a fixture in Port Chester and serves mainly the southern part of the county and clients in the Bronx. 

The model it has used in Port Chester, using a skeleton staff and scores of volunteers to coordinate the operation, will be very similar in Mount Kisco, Haseltine said. There are about 13 employees at the new location bolstered by scores of community volunteers.

In 2025, Meals on Main St. rescued more than 1.3 million pounds of food resulting in over 1.1 million meals served. With food insecurity still front and center and inflation eating away at families’ budgets, it is projected the organization will serve about 1.7 million meals this year, Haseltine said.

“The reason we’re in northern Westchester, we know there are a lot of SNAP recipients up here, households that have asset limits and are struggling, so anything we can do to help these clients out we will,” Haseltine said.

Nutritious excess food is picked up from local restaurants, farms, commissaries, groceries and supermarkets and brought to the church’s commercial-grade kitchen. Chefs who are part of the staff prepare the meals, before they are packaged and distributed to community organizations, houses of worship and schools.

Meals on Main St. also operates a mobile pantry truck where it heads out into the community. The public does not visit the site.

“The clients that we have, we go to them,” Haseltine said. “So the whole idea of the mobile pantry truck and the kitchen, we prepare everything here and we bring it to where the people live. That’s the goal.”

The organization’s board president, Sam Dimon, a parishioner at Trinity Church, got the discussions started toward bringing in a pantry or some other service that could help others in the community.

“I was here and saw a kitchen and a cafeteria here and I thought we could put this to good use,” Dimon said.

However, the kitchen needed to be renovated and the area made suitable for food preparation again. A Community Development Block Grant from Westchester County for $200,000 was awarded to do that work, said Trinity Church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Steven Magneson. Construction started earlier this year and was recently completed. 

Since buying the property and moving in about four years ago, Trinity Church has had excess space, Magneson said. Meals on Main St. now has a 10-year lease at the site.

“Most of the kitchen equipment was already here, and the infrastructure was here, but it was dated,” he said. “So we had to bring it up to code, we had to redo things, replace the fan on the roof. But truthfully, everything was already in place.”

Meals on Main St. has about 20 partners that it teams up with, ranging from Westchester County government to other nonprofit organizations and the business community. Although it is its own outfit, Haseltine described its work and coordination with other entities as a private-public partnership.

Lopez, the county’s planning commission, said there is no better way to support the organization and tackle food insecurity than to bring relief to more families..

“Meals on Main is such a fabulous organization, and I will say to the Town of Bedford and Mount Kisco, you are sharing a great community partner,” Lopez said. “They’re there for every type of event, every type of activity, every type of campaign that you may have to combat food insecurity, to bring people together.”

Haseltine said the mission is more than just sustenance and feeding people, but building community.

“Today, we just don’t open a kitchen, we open a new chapter here in Mount Kisco and the surrounding area,” he said. “We’ll go as far as we can where compassion and a commercial-grade home — our kitchen here — one where northern Westchester takes another step forward towards the future, one where hunger has no place at our table.”