(OR23-01-23) The Impact of a Pilot Nutrition Incentive Program on Total Produce Sales and Types of Produce Purchase Selections by SNAP Consumers in a Predominantly Rural Grocery Store Chain

Objectives: Nutrition incentive (NI) programs increase spending capacity of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for fruits and vegetables (F/Vs) to encourage the purchase of these foods. Most published evaluations of NI programs are limited to farmers’ markets, which limits generalizability of their impact in other settings, such as grocery stores. Further, few studies describe the produce types purchased by NI programs users.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of a NI pilot program in nine predominantly rural grocery stores in Oklahoma using total and itemized sales data.

Methods: From November 2019 to October 2022, Hunger Free Oklahoma partnered with a grocery store chain to pilot Double-Up Oklahoma (DUO) in nine predominantly rural low-income, low-access Oklahoma communities. DUO-stores provided SNAP consumers with a fresh produce voucher after the transaction worth up to $20 per day, matched 1:1 based on total SNAP dollars spent on food. The grocery partner provided all sales and voucher data. Produce Universal product codes (UPC) from DUO transactions were manually matched to USDA categories by registered dietitians to assess produce selections. We estimated users, voucher redemption rates, and compared trends of seasonally-adjusted produce sales in DUO-stores to matched non-DUO stores from baseline to the end of year 2. All analyses were performed in R, v4.1.0 and SAS, v9.4.

Results: By the end of program year 2, over 800,000 vouchers were issued to more than 60,000 unique SNAP consumers across the nine DUO pilot stores and monthly voucher redemption rates grew from 27.9% to 43.9%. SNAP produce sales increased by 357% across DUO stores compared to only 22% in matched non-DUO stores. UPC analysis revealed a slight preference for vegetables over fruits (53.3%), including a variety of selections across USDA vegetable categories: 11.0% red/orange, 9.7% dark green, 7.3% starchy, and 25.3% other non-starchy with 17.8% of produce purchases classified as ready-to-eat.

Conclusions: Grocery store partnerships allowing for sales data exchange enable thorough objective evaluation of grocery store NI programs. These analyses indicate NI programs in grocery stores can significantly boost SNAP produce sales across a wide variety of F/V.

Funding Sources: USDA Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program and Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust