15 Million Hungry Kids
About 46.5 million people in the U.S. rely on food stamps (SNAP benefits) to help supplement their budgets.
But those benefits are nearly impossible to use in many low-income areas, because many residents have limited access to a supermarket—and they can't use their food stamps to purchase food online.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers the federal food stamp program. Under today’s USDA regulations, food stamp recipients can use their food stamps only to shop at qualifying “brick-and-mortar” retail stores.
But millions of food stamp recipients live in food deserts—sometimes hours away from a SNAP-approved grocery store. And only 24 percent of those under the poverty line have access to a car.
In fact, nearly 23 million people in the U.S. live in places where there is little or no access to healthy food, sometimes for dozens of miles.
What if those families could use their food stamps to purchase healthy food online?
Allowing food stamp recipients to use their benefits to buy groceries online would give them much greater access to healthy food.
Not only that, but shopping online could help these families stretch their food budgets because brick-and-mortar stores have overhead costs which get passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
One in four kids—about 15 million children—here in the U.S. goes hungry on any given day. Shouldn't we make it as easy, and cost-effective, for families on food stamps to feed their kids?
OCA has teamed up with Thrive Market and a coalition of nonprofits, media partners, healthfood brands and bloggers to ask the USDA to change its stance on prohibiting the use of food stamps to buy food online.
Thank you!
Katherine and the team at OCA
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