In the United States today, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supports millions of low-income pregnant and postpartum persons, infants, and children under five, with the goal of improving nutrition, health, and early childhood outcomes, preventing WIC benefits from going unused.

In fiscal year 2024, WIC served about 6.7 million participants per month, at a federal cost of approximately $7.2 billion.

Yet even as WIC remains one of the nation’s most proven public health interventions, its promise is blunted by steep barriers to usage.

Only around 53 percent of eligible individuals participate in the program. And among families who are enrolled, a significant share of benefits go unredeemed—studies estimate that 18.5 percent of WIC food benefit dollars remain unused on average.

These gaps are not just abstract numbers, they reflect real stress for families trying to put healthy food on the table, confusion navigating complex rules, and wasted potential in a program meant to safeguard early childhood health.

In this conversation, we speak with Dani Lopez, Co-Founder and CSO of Lulo, a tech startup built to help families fully access WIC benefits and reclaim dignity, time, and nutrition.

Causeartist: What was the lightbulb moment behind the origin story of Lulo?

Dani: Lulo began at Blue Ridge Labs, the tech innovation arm of the Robin Hood Foundation. Our founding team, Sarah Stellwag (CEO), Rye Welz Geselowitz (Founding Engineer), Unnati Shukla (Head of Design), and me, Dani Lopez (CSO)—met through the Fellowship focused on building solutions with low-income NYC families.

Sarah had seen at Propel how powerful tech could be for SNAP households and wanted to tackle WIC, a program that provides over $1,000 a year in healthy food but leaves more than $1 billion in benefits unused annually.

I connected to that immediately, having been a WIC baby and a frustrated benefits bureaucrat. Rye, also a postpartum doula, was eager to build human-centered technology, and Unnati made sure Lulo was easy to use and beautiful, something unheard of when it comes to benefits and safety net programs.

Read the full article about Lulo's solution to WIC benefits going unused by Grant Trahant at Causeartist.