Navigating to better food access

Customized, easy-to-use maps elevate a joyful user experience and support decision-making.

Lemontree's CTO, Samuel Cole, was recently featured by Mapbox, the platform that supports Lemontree's modern maps and travel-time guidance, which improve food security for thousands of neighbors every day.

Lemontree has guided more than 900,000 families to nearby food resources since 2021 and now supports thousands of households every day across eleven regions in the United States.

Applying a modern product and engineering mindset to food access, Lemontree’s core idea is simple: accessing free food should feel as easy as booking an Uber, shopping on Amazon, or choosing a doctor on Zocdoc.

To create a personalized list of resources for each person, while expanding to reach thousands a day, Lemontree developed an AI model that scores each pantry for each client based on four main factors: data confidence and recency, opening schedule, client experience ratings and feedback, and proximity.

Lemontree learned that listing addresses and distance alone was not meaningful to many people. A location might sound far away based on its address but is actually only a five-minute walk away. Or a location that is technically nearby might be difficult to reach if it requires crossing a highway. Without maps, it was hard for people to visualize how close a resource really was and how they could get to it.

"We had a moment where one of our engineers was like, ‘What if we use travel time instead of as-a-bird-flies distance?’ And that was a real unlock for us. All of a sudden, 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.'" -Samuel Cole, CTO

On Lemontree's maps, you can see the representation of the streets and routes you're going to take and map it to the landmarks that are in your head from real life.

Lemontree has scaled from a single phone line in New York to an on-demand service that supports thousands of households every day across eleven regions. Neighbors no longer need to decode address lists or guess how far a pantry might be. They can see options clearly on a map and quickly understand how long it will take to get there.

Maps also reinforce Lemontree’s ethos: food access should feel welcoming. Clients describe the experience of locating and navigating to food pantries recommended by Lemontree as simple, clear, and encouraging. For staff and partners, custom map visualization dashboards provide a clear view of coverage and impact without compromising privacy.

Thank you to Mapbox for showcasing Lemontree's work and for supporting the maps that make it possible for us to help neighbors navigate to free food every day!