Fact Check: Did Travis Kelce buy tiny diner from college days to feed homeless people?
CINCINNATI, OHIO: A touching story about Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has captured hearts online.
According to the viral post, Kelce quietly bought a small diner that had once let him run a tab during his college years. Now, that same spot has been transformed into a community kitchen serving hot meals to around 120 homeless people daily.
Claim: Travis Kelce reportedly transforms college diner into place serving meals to homeless people
The post, which circulated widely on platforms like Threads and Facebook in June 2025, describes Travis Kelce tracking down the original diner’s kind owner, "Elena", buying the place as she was preparing to close, and reopening it as “Elena’s Kitchen” to serve daily meals to the local homeless community.
The rumor went viral, boosted by emotionally charged captions and AI-generated images of Kelce appearing to serve food to people on the street. But is there any truth to this uplifting tale?
False: Travis Kelce did not buy a diner from his college days to feed homeless people
There is no credible evidence that Travis Kelce ever purchased a diner or opened a food service for homeless individuals in Kansas City or anywhere else, as per Snopes.
Searches across multiple major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo found no reports from legitimate news outlets covering such an initiative.
Given Kelce’s high public profile, both as an NFL star and as Taylor Swift’s current partner — any real act of philanthropy of this scale would likely attract widespread media coverage. However, there has been no reporting from sports media, local Kansas City outlets, or national platforms to support this claim.
The earliest posts promoting the story all linked back to ad-heavy websites like News75today.com, which have a history of publishing viral, often fictional, inspirational stories to drive traffic and revenue. These sites frequently lack editorial oversight and rarely cite verifiable sources.
Signs of AI fabrication
Several of the images used to support the claim were flagged as likely AI-generated by tools such as Sightengine. According to the AI image detection platform Sightengine, there’s a 99.9% chance the images were generated by artificial intelligence.
Kelce’s eyes looked oddly mismatched, the man receiving food had a distorted, unnatural-looking hand, and the food itself was vague and unrecognizable. In one image, a partial bowl awkwardly floated above a plate, adding to the suspicion that the images weren’t authentic snapshots but rather convincingly crafted fabrications.
The story about Travis Kelce buying a diner and turning it into a kitchen for the homeless turned out to be more feel-good fiction than fact. It was the latest in a string of made-up, heartwarming tales crafted by internet users looking to drive traffic and ad revenue to linked websites shared through viral Facebook posts.
In truth, the tale falls into a category known as “glurge”, a term for overly sentimental stories that sound inspiring but are often exaggerated or entirely made up, as defined by Dictionary.com.
