Operation FreeChee

It’s the simplest of comfort-food meals: a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. But when Billy and Lorena Smith are serving, it comes with smiles and words of encouragement.

For many of the recipients of this free meal—disaster victims, homeless men and women, impoverished schoolchildren—the hope and cheer it provides are as important as the food itself.

Welcome to Operation FreeChee, a nonprofit operation launched by the Smiths to feed the hungry and to spread a little love. It arrives in the form of a food truck of sorts: a 22-foot trailer that is a self-sustaining comfort-food factory capable of feeding 400 people an hour. On its longest goodwill mission, Billy and Lorena worked the trailer by themselves, churning out grilled cheese sandwiches by the hundreds and tomato soup by the gallon for the people of Panama City, Florida, who were living without power or fresh food in the weeks after Hurricane Michael in 2018.

“It’s food, but it’s also moral support,” Lorena says. “In that situation, people can think the world forgot about them. But we want them to know that we’re all in this together.”

This charity began as a whisper of an idea in the hearts and minds of a couple who worked in the restaurant business and loved living in their hometown of Lancaster, Ohio. Both were born in Lancaster and moved away but eventually came back. They met and married 20 years ago. They became successful in business and involved in the Lancaster community. But they had the skills and the desire to use food to help people in a different way.

“There are not a lot of foods you can do as quickly as we do with only a few ingredients,” Billy says. “We were able to find a simple and fairly inexpensive way to feed somebody, to make them smile for the day.”

With a goal of helping people in their time of need, Billy designed the trailer to be self-contained, including a generator running lights, a 20-gallon soup kettle and a large panini press that can make 16 grilled cheese sandwiches every 80 seconds. They make use of the classic ingredients that people remember from childhood: Kraft cheese slices and Campbell’s tomato soup.

Adorned with a brightly colored Operation FreeChee logo (“Soup, Sandwich and a Smile!”), the trailer was put to use at another natural disaster last June, serving tornado victims in the Dayton area. But the Smiths don’t just wait for a crisis. The Operation FreeChee Facebook page is a chronicle of their travels to United Way events, Lancaster community festivals, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and schools around Central Ohio.

“We built it to respond to natural disasters and times of hardship, but it’s also been nice to go out just for the fun of it,” Lorena says. “Grilled cheese and tomato soup is just an all-American thing that everybody loves.”

Their charity efforts thus far have been funded by profits from their current Lancaster restaurant, the Cherry Street Pub, opened in 2015. They also have a catering business, the Smoked Food Factory, and are partners in The Mill Event Center.

“At the end of the day, it’s really the community here in Lancaster that made this possible because they’ve been so supportive of our restaurants,” Billy says. “The pub here paid for everything, which means the community paid for it. We couldn’t be more grateful and thankful for that.”

The Smiths have plans for more trips this year, but Billy sees ways to expand the charity operation beyond the trailer, including designing a smaller version of the rig (which, with the pickup truck that pulls it, currently requires a 50-foot parking space) and raising enough money to build FreeChee vehicles for other communities.

“It’s just people helping people,” Billy says, “and spreading love through grilled cheese.”

• Learn more about the operation at operationfreechee.com and follow their travels at Facebook.com/OperationFreeChee.