The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a rule Wednesday that would significantly raise the bar for what grocery stores and other retailers must stock to accept federal food-assistance payments.
Under the new requirements, authorized retailers for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program must carry seven varieties of items across four staple food categories: protein, grains, dairy, and fruits and vegetables. The agency said the change will more than double the existing stocking requirement, expand perishable food requirements and close a loophole that previously allowed some snack foods to count toward staple food thresholds.
“Before today, you could stock jelly as a fruit and jerky as a real protein; all that changes today,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Fox Business.
“For those that do get a lot of their groceries from a corner store, from a bodega, we’re going to make sure there’s a lot more nutritious foods on the shelf,” Rollins said.
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The changes take effect in the fall, and the agency plans to issue additional guidance to retailers in the coming weeks.
The rule comes as the USDA and Health and Human Services have pushed to reshape SNAP around what Rollins called an emphasis on “real food.” Rollins noted that SNAP-authorized retailers accept more than $90 billion annually, or roughly $236 million a day, in federal dollars.
Advocacy groups raised concerns about previous changes that required stores to stock certain items to accept SNAP, arguing that it would push many stores out of the program rather than adding to their shelves. About 71% of stores that accept SNAP are small stores, including convenience stores and small grocers.
The National Grocers Association, comprised of independent grocers, expressed support for the changes, saying the requirements “reinforce the importance of access to a broad range of real foods.”
Since the start of the Trump administration, the Food and Nutrition Service has taken action against nearly 3,200 retailers for failing to meet stocking standards. The release ties the stocking changes directly to retailers that the USDA says have seen the most program violations.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the changes “commonsense reforms.”
“This rule puts real food back at the center of SNAP,” Kennedy said in a statement accompanying the USDA announcement. “This is how we Make America Healthy Again.”
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