Should Food Stamp Recipients Be Allowed to Buy Groceries Online?

Online grocers bring groceries right to your front door, allowing modern consumers the chance to indulge new levels of laziness that generations past couldn't even fathom. But the millions of Americans on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supplies food stamps to low-income households, have been left out. Now, an online grocery chain is helping lead a coalition of organizations and other interested companies in a petition to bring food stamps online.

Thrive Market is an online grocery store that delivers non-perishable health-oriented foods at discounted prices to members who pay a annual fee. For every member who signs up, Thrive Market gives a membership to a low-income family at no cost. The company has raised more than $110 million in funding, and recently announced it will appear before Congress this month to make a case for bringing food stamps online.

"The first step is access," Thrive Market co-founder and co-CEO Gunnar Lovelace told MUNCHIES by email. "Thousands of [our customers in our no-fee Giving Program] rely on food assistance but cannot use them online to buy healthy food."

Access is certainly an issue, but for Thrive, the company is also looking at a potentially huge customer base. For many of the 46 million-plus families on food stamps, finding healthy foods in their neighborhoods can be a challenge. Stuck in food deserts—where the closest store selling food is often a convenience store full of pre-packaged foods or microwaveable meals—many SNAP recipients can't use their food stamps to buy fresh fruit, vegetables, grains, pulses, or meat. Instead, rural and urban food stamp recipients alike are often stuck with less healthy options.

An online grocery store could help SNAP recipients get nutritious food at an affordable price, Thrive argues. It would also help to sidestep the stigma that recipients can experience at grocery store checkout counters, when they're told by a cashier that the items they're trying to buy aren't eligible for purchase with food stamps. Thrive says that it would create a system that easily identifies what foods are eligible for purchase under SNAP guidelines.

But if the argument for bringing food stamps online is to encourage people to buy healthy foods, there's no guarantee that it would work. Online shopping is the Wild West of insane deals on things like bulk candy and soda, which are eligible to purchase using food stamps. While some have proposed legislation to cut junk food from the list of SNAP-eligible foods, limiting the items that food stamp recipients may buy can also shame them.

FreshDirect, an online grocer in the New York City area, is part of a pilot program that allows customers to order food online and pay using Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, a debit card system. So far, the FreshDirect EBT Pilot Program delivers to two zip codes in the Bronx. Customers paying with EBT shop from SNAP-approved foods, and when their order arrives, the customer simply swipes their card. Delivery is free, and purchases are untaxed. FreshDirect says it has received positive feedback on the program.

"FreshDirect firmly believes that healthy food options should be accessible to everyone and we strongly support efforts at the federal level to expand the program so that online grocery shopping is available to all enrollees in the SNAP program, enabling food stamps to be valued like any other form of credit payment," FreshDirect's vice president of public affairs, Larry Scott Blackmon, said in a statement to MUNCHIES.

But there are challenges. While online grocery shopping may eliminate the need to run around the neighborhood buying items at several stores, delivering food to someone purchasing with an EBT card requires that person to be present for the delivery to swipe his or her card. Reform to SNAP could change that.

Until food stamps come online, SNAP recipients are limited to what they can get locally. The debate highlights an interesting conflict where two movements are at loggerheads: People in the food world encourage eating locally, while technology companies encourage thinking globally. In this case, internet grocers argue, the best way for SNAP recipients to eat well is to venture online.