The rapid rise of food delivery and online grocery shopping, particularly among SNAP recipients, is both transforming the food system and raising new questions about how to measure and improve access to food and food security, according to two new reports from the Brookings Institution.
“In the 21st century, this concept of food access is really being turned on its head,” said Caroline George, a senior research assistant at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and coauthor of a pair of companion reports published on Wednesday. “With delivery in particular, for the first time, food can meet people where they are and not the other way around.”
Digital food delivery services grew exponentially during the pandemic. Now 93 percent of Americans, including 90 percent of people in communities that fit the federal definition of a “food desert,” live within areas covered by four of the most prominent delivery companies — Amazon (which includes Whole Foods), Instacart, Uber Eats, and Walmart — the authors found.
What’s more, every state except for Alaska now allows SNAP benefits to be used online, and a pilot is underway that lets participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) use their benefits online.
But just as the concept of a food desert has been criticized for focusing on physical proximity to grocery stores rather than the underlying question of whether someone has enough money to buy food, delivery services won’t make a meaningful dent in food insecurity unless they are affordable and people have the tools to access them. Many households that could technically have groceries delivered lack broadband access, either because they can’t afford it, don’t have the necessary devices or digital skills to use it, or don’t have access to the necessary infrastructure, George said. And SNAP benefits can’t be used to cover grocery delivery fees or tips for drivers. At the same time, delivery services are concentrated in cities and suburbs, leaving people living in rural and remote areas behind.
Because the digital food system is still taking shape, now is an ideal time to design policies that ensure the system addresses such issues as equity, affordability, and fairness, the authors wrote.
One key issue is trust, George said, both in terms of companies providing quality products to shoppers and also protecting consumers’ data and privacy. For instance, consumers may not trust that professional shoppers will be as discerning as they are; a paper cited by the authors found that SNAP-eligible shoppers with children bought less fresh produce, meat, and fish online than at brick-and-mortar stores, often over concerns that these highly perishable foods would arrive rotten. “This is a serious financial risk if you are shopping on a low budget,” George said.
Shopping online also raises questions about consumers’ privacy, targeted marketing, and the use of big data, George said. The reports urged the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Federal Communications Commission to ensure that SNAP recipients are protected from predatory marketing practices and to develop and enforce “best-in-class” privacy standards.
And while the brick-and-mortar food system is already highly consolidated — with 20 companies controlling 65.1 percent of the food retailer market share — the online food retail market is even more concentrated. Walmart alone controls half of that market, the authors found, and Walmart, Amazon, and Kroger account for nearly three-quarters of all online food sales. The USDA could help make this market accessible to smaller grocers, and increase consumer choice, by providing technical assistance to smaller companies, the authors said.
Another consideration is the overall effect on poverty and inequality if grocery stores — which have historically had stronger union representation — lose ground to online grocers like Instacart that rely on gig workers and have been criticized for low pay and poor working conditions.
Overall, George said, the digital food system offers rich and exciting possibilities for mitigating food access and insecurity problems. But that will happen only if policymakers and advocates ensure that the questions about equity, affordability, and trust they’ve been working to solve in the brick-and-mortar food system for years are also addressed in the nascent digital one.
“I think one of the traps might be to just treat this as a novelty and not apply that same rigor, and not carry over some of the lessons to this new environment,” she said.