The Department of Agriculture issued a proposed rule Friday that would ease the standards for how many and what types of products food retailers must stock in order to accept SNAP benefits at their stores. An Obama-era rule had expanded the amount of healthy foods that retailers had to stock in order to participate in the program.
In 2016, the USDA changed its standards to require retailers to offer 84 healthy food items across “four categories of staple foods, seven varieties in each category and three items of each variety,” as FERN reported at the time. The 2016 rule was born of the 2014 farm bill, which included a provision requiring USDA to expand the range of food available for sale to people participating in the SNAP program. It only required half as many items as the 168 originally proposed by the agency.
In last week’s proposed rule, the USDA loosened the standards for which types of products can qualify to meet that retailer standard. For instance, the vegetable requirement can now be met with canned beets, lemon juice, and canned olives.
The proposal was applauded by retailers, who have argued for years that the variety standard would reduce the number of retailers participating in the SNAP program.
“Convenience stores and other neighborhood stores face storage and size constraints, as well as delivery limitations, which would have made [the Food and Nutrition Service’s] original definition of variety almost impossible to comply with even for the most sophisticated retail operations,” said Anna Ready, director of government relations at the National Association of Convenience Stores, in a statement. “As Congress intended, the proposed definition of ‘variety’ will provide retailers with greater flexibility to reach eligibility requirements without making retailers stock items that simply do not sell in their stores or that they do not have the space or capacity to sell.”