People on food assistance increasingly turn to grocery delivery. But not without a price tag. (Boston Globe)
Below is an excerpt from an article published by the Boston Globe on July 12 highlighting the benefits and drawbacks of SNAP-covered grocery delivery services in Massachusetts. Massachusetts Law Reform Institute’s Pat Baker is quoted.
More and more food assistance recipients are turning to online grocery ordering, expanding on a shopping trend that has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic.
But while the services add convenience for households where people sometimes work multiple jobs and care for relatives, they can also add significant costs to food budgets for families already struggling to make ends meet.
Online grocery ordering, which encompasses both delivery and pick-up, became available to food stamp recipients in Massachusetts in 2020, during the pandemic. And it’s taken off ever since, seeing a more than 820 percent jump in use by food assistance participants from 2020 to 2023, according to the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance.
Last year, food stamp recipients placed more than 4 million online grocery orders, the department said. That’s nowhere near the number of in-person transactions, which topped nearly 93 million last year, but it has become a useful, if not costly, alternative for some users of the government’s benefit for low-income shoppers, known as SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Participants and observers of the program say the convenience of grocery delivery can be crucial for busy families. But some warn that the fees charged by delivery services can be burdensome for some shoppers.
Read more at the Boston Globe.
