A text helpline matches US families with the right free food pantry

Problem

The first version of the Lemontree helpline rang on one person’s cell phone. Kasumi Quinlan, who co-founded the nonprofit, started by putting up flyers in New York City and taking calls from neighbors who were looking for food. The helpline began in 2020.

Lemontree points out that the US has more food pantries than McDonald’s restaurants. Yet fewer than one in four households that struggle to afford enough food use them, according to a 2025 profile of Quinlan published by Fast Forward and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. The profile calls the system “fragmented, confusing, and often stigmatizing”.

Pantry opening hours shift often, sites move, and some pantries hand out food from different street corners on different days. Some ask for ID or ask people to register first.

“In every city, there are ample resources and billions of dollars allocated toward food access. They’re just underutilized,” Quinlan told The Boston Globe in 2023.

AI solution

For a family, the service starts with a message. A person texts 90847, signs up on WhatsApp or uses the website, answers a few questions, and gets a personal list of nearby food pantries, soup kitchens and help with SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the US government’s main food benefit).

Clients get reminders when a pantry opens and can ask questions by text. After a visit, Lemontree asks them to review the pantry and share a photo of the food they received. A human “hospitality specialist” can step in with personal recommendations.

The AI sits behind that list. Lemontree describes a recommendation model: for each family, it gives every nearby pantry a score and puts the best matches first. It is not a chatbot, and none of the public sources say what type of model it is. According to a customer story published by the mapping company Mapbox, the score weighs four things: how complete and recent the pantry’s data is, its opening schedule, ratings and feedback from other clients, and how close it is. Quinlan adds pantry rules, such as ID and registration, and the family’s travel preferences.

She gives an example. A pantry around the corner that opens once a month may rank below one ten minutes away that opens every day and gets good reviews from neighbors.

The team also changed how the model measures distance. Early versions used a straight line on the map; now the model uses travel time from Mapbox’s directions service: walking time in New York City, driving time in regions where most people drive. “It’s so much easier to understand when you replace saying ‘this pantry is 0.136 miles away’ with ‘it’s a 3-minute walk,’” said Samuel Cole, Lemontree’s chief technology officer.

The team says it spent two years building its data systems before it built the model. Hundreds of pantries now update their own schedules, and the system sends alerts when hours change or a site closes. Clients’ reviews keep the picture fresh: in October 2026 the website counted more than 58,000.

The team chose text and WhatsApp so families can use the phones they already have. WhatsApp was added to reach migrants and people who do not speak English.

Pantries and food banks get dashboards on demand, wait times and data problems. City Harvest and MendNJ are named users. The dashboards group clients by ZIP code area, so partners do not see where individual families live. In October 2025, AI analysis of food photos and a mobile app were still plans, not live features.

Impact

Lemontree is a deployed service that has grown fast. In 2023, The Boston Globe reported that it went from helping 1,500 people in all of 2020 to more than 1,000 people a day. In 2024, Cole said, it connected 350,000 neighbors with free food, a 300% increase on the year before.

Demand hit a record in November 2025, when SNAP benefits were disrupted. On Tuesday, November 4, Lemontree helped more than 21,000 families, its all-time high, up from 12,000 the Tuesday before.

As of October 31, 2026, Lemontree’s About page says it helps “over 18,000 people” a day and that more than 900,000 families have found free food through it. The site lists 12 places, from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., and says more launches are planned in 2026.

These figures come from Lemontree, its funders or its suppliers. We found no independent study of whether families who get a recommendation reach the pantry and come home with food.

People

Kasumi Quinlan is Lemontree’s co-founder and executive director. Her idea of “hospitality” is to let technology handle what computers do well, so staff can spend their energy on human connection. “When clients know that there’s a human being on the other end who’s really listening, it really lets us build a deeper relationship with them,” she told The Boston Globe.

Alex Godin is a co-founder and sits on the board. Samuel Cole leads the technology. “AI gives us the tools to be more human,” he told the funder PagerDuty.org. Claire Bleiler, chief of staff, leads fundraising, programs and community work.

The service also rests on many other people: helpline specialists and data researchers on staff, pantry teams who update their own listings, and clients whose reviews guide the next family.

Funding has come from PagerDuty’s foundation arm, PagerDuty.org, as an unrestricted grant, and from the Liberty Mutual Foundation for the Boston launch. “While many traditional food assistance funders are pulling back, PagerDuty believed in our vision and gave us the flexibility to invest where we saw the greatest need,” Bleiler said.

Quinlan put it this way in a 2025 interview: “AI offers us new and faster ways to accomplish any kind of impact, but it’s our responsibility to use it wisely. To preserve and propagate what’s important to us”.

Why it matters

In much of the US, free food already exists close to the families who need it. Lemontree uses a modest kind of AI, a ranking model fed by neighbors’ reviews and backed by people on the other end of the line, to make that help easier to find, and in November 2025 the service went from 12,000 to more than 21,000 families in a day within one week. What it still needs is independent evidence of how many more families end up with food on the table.

What we could not confirm (11)

• An independent evaluation: we found none showing whether families who get a recommendation reach the pantry and receive food. All figures are self-reported or published by funders and suppliers.
• What type of model Lemontree uses, and how it tests the accuracy of its recommendations. “AI” is the organization’s own description.
• Current daily reach. Lemontree’s pages say “over 18,000 people”, “thousands of households” and, in a Mapbox story, “tens of thousands of households” a day. We used the About page figure.
• Total reach. Several Lemontree pages say 900,000+ families; a 2026 conference speaker bio for its chief of staff says “over two million households”. We used the lower figure.
• How “families”, “people”, “households”, “neighbors” and “subscribers” are counted, and how the “$7.6M+ in savings for families” on the website is calculated.
• The founding story. Lemontree says it started in June 2020 as a helpline; The Boston Globe reported in 2023 that it was founded in 2017 as a meal kit service and became a helpline in late 2020. We say only that the helpline began in 2020.
• The number of regions. The About page says “eleven regions” but lists 12 places.
• How much each donated dollar provides: Lemontree’s pages say both $8 and “up to $9” in free food per $1. We left the figure out.
• How client data is protected beyond the ZIP code grouping on partner dashboards, and how outdated pantry details are caught in practice.
• The size of the PagerDuty.org and Liberty Mutual Foundation grants.
• Whether the mobile app and the AI analysis of food photos, both described as plans in October 2025, have launched since.