 Years later Thompson would feed 60,000 people a day from his soup kitchen in London.Benjamin Thompson pioneered institutional feeding of the poor and is credited with introducing the potato to the diet of the European poor, inventing the double boiler, the kitchen range, baking oven, pressure cooker, drip coffee maker which are the forerunners to the steam jacketed kettle, compartment steamer, and commercial ovens used for school food programs today.In the United Kingdom, significant changes have been made from when school meals were introduced in the nineteenth century.