SNAP recipients will now be able to buy food online from two additional retailers, Thrive and DashMart, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service's (FNS) efforts to modernize the program.
While SNAP recipients are already able to shop online from more than 200 authorized retailers—including big stores like Costco, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart, though availability changes state by state—it's the first time that online-only retailers without a brick-and-mortar presence are included in the list.
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FNS is currently piloting the two online-only retailers, Thrive and DashMart, before expanding approvals to other online-only retailers whose business model must align with SNAP eligibility requirements.
Thrive, launched in 2014, is a membership-based food discovery and ordering app that offers customers a variety of high-quality, healthy groceries for home delivery. The membership costs $60 per year, but SNAP recipients will be able to join for free. DashMart, an online grocery store run by Doordash, offers fresh groceries and household essentials.
The addition of these two retailers will give SNAP participants more options, according to FNS, "especially those who live in areas with limited access to food, allowing them the same convenience and variety of options enjoyed by all Americans when it comes to grocery shopping."
Millions of SNAP recipients across all 50 states and the District of Columbia already use their benefits to buy food online every month, FNS wrote.
This reflects the overall situation in the U.S. market, where more and more consumers have made a habit of shopping for groceries online in the past few years. According to a 2022 survey conducted by PYMNTS, one in six Americans (15.8 percent) ordered groceries online for home delivery every week.
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The SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot was first rolled out in 2019 and quickly expanded when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020 when the amount of SNAP online grocery purchases suddenly shot up.
A study published in November 2023 in Food Policy analyzing 2020 data found that letting low-income households buy their groceries online with SNAP benefits was an effective way to decrease the number of families experiencing food insufficiency. The rate of households sometimes or often not having enough food to eat dropped from 24.5 percent to 22.5 percent at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
SNAP currently helps more than 42 million Americans put food on the table every month. Many live in areas where access to food is limited and it's hard to find high-quality groceries nearby.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek Reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. and European politics, global affairs ... Read more
