A soup kitchen, food kitchen, or meal center, is a place where food is offered to the hungry usually for free or sometimes at a below-market price (such as via coin donations upon visiting). Frequently located in lower-income neighborhoods, soup kitchens are often staffed by volunteer organizations, such as church or community groups. Soup kitchens sometimes obtain food from a food bank for free or at a low price, because they are considered a charity, which makes it easier for them to feed the many people who require their services.

Many historical and modern soup kitchens serve only soup, or just soup with bread. But other establishments which refer to themselves as a "soup kitchen" also serve a wider range of food, so social scientists sometimes discuss them together with similar hunger relief agencies that provide more varied hot meals, like food kitchens and meal centers.

While societies have been using various methods to share food with the hungry for millennia, the first soup kitchens in the modern sense may have emerged in the late 18th century. By the late 19th century, they were located in several American and European cities. In the United States and elsewhere, they became more prominent in the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. With the much improved economic conditions that immediately followed World War II, soup kitchens became less widely used, at least in the advanced economies. In the United States, there was a resurgence in the use of soup kitchens following the cutbacks in welfare that were implemented in the early 1980s.

In the 21st century, the use of soup kitchens expanded in both the United States and Europe, following lasting global increases in the price of food which began in late 2006. Demand for their services grew as the Great Recession began to worsen economic conditions for those with lower incomes. In much of the UK and Europe, demand further increased after the introduction of austerity-based economic policies from 2010. For instance, Emma Middleton, a poverty caseworker in the UK stated in 2017 that the situation and need for emergency food aid in the UK had changed significantly over the last 15 years, as the cost of living increased and the existing safety nets disappeared, adding "In the first few years [of this work], food poverty was not an issue. The soup kitchens and churches could deal with it, and it was mainly homelessness. You never saw families like that. What we see now is a constant stream of food poverty."