N.J. food stamp recipients can shop online this summer

New Jersey looks for those solutions being implemented successfully in other regions around the country to fight hunger in food deserts and poor neighborhoods, assessing what can be replicated in their local communities to address these issues.

More than a dozen states are participating in a SNAP program, allowing people experiencing economic hardship to purchase food online from retailers. While only certain online retailers allow for food stamp purchases and SNAP users can’t pay for delivery fees with their benefits, more states are piloting the program, which could prove useful for people quarantining from the novel coronavirus.

To address the food insecurity problem among its low-income students, Columbia University launched Swipes, a meal sharing app in which students with a surplus of “meal swipes” could donate them to students in need. But when that app struggled to function and roll out properly, Columbia looked downtown to New York University, where student Jon Chin launched a similarly purposed but more effectively designed app, Share Meals. So far, the app has enabled over a thousand meal donations, and is hoping to work with Columbia to share its code and expand its donor services.

While the USPS has seen a drastic decline in revenues and capacity in recent years due to growing competition from the private sector and social changes, First Class Meal is reimagining the role that this institution has to play: improving national access to healthy food. Using the existing USPS app to connect organizations and food banks that struggle to distribute donations, postal drivers out on their normal routes would pick up donations, deliver to food banks or pantries, and store food in post offices with excess capacity.

In Dandabazar, a community-wide shift to commercial cauliflower farming was supported by local government seed distribution and subsidies for modern tools. This transformed a food-insecure hill village into a recognized vegetable-producing hub, enabling individual farmers to grow their businesses.

California's farm-to-school grant program, launched in 2021, has successfully directed 100% of its funding to small and disadvantaged farmers. This has helped them expand their businesses through investments like refrigerated vans and partnerships with food hubs, enabling fresh local produce delivery to schools across the state.

Double Up Food Bucks offers dollar-for-dollar matching of up to $10 daily for fresh fruits and vegetables for those enrolled in SNAP. The program addresses affordability issues that historically prevented people from accessing fresh, nutritious foods. Double Up Food Bucks works with more than 250 grocery stores throughout the state to provide widespread access to fresh produce.

The West Contra Costa Unified School District saw loosened regulations during the pandemic as an opportunity to tie up with local organic farms and producers and ensure hundred percent organic meals to students from low-income families. This is part of a growing effort in the state that recognizes school lunch as a way to not just provide the healthiest food to students but also to support a more sustainable food system that helps address climate change.

In California, the state's Healthy Grant Refrigeration Program is enabling corner stores and small markets with means for refrigeration and distribution channels so they can offer fresh food to residents in their communities who otherwise do not have access to it.

The Farmers to Family program, an initiative from the U.S Department of Agriculture set aside $3 billion for its Farmers to Families Food Box program, part of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program. The program awarded contracts farmers and distributors to provide food for families experiencing food insecurity. The article lays out some of the challenges with the program like issues with how the contracts were awarded, difficulty coordinating between distributors and farmers, stringent requirements, as well as the quick, creative solutions that were deployed to overcome them.