Food Lion, GIANT, Hannaford and Stop & Shop Increase Healthy Food Access by Enabling EBT-SNAP Payments for Grocery Delivery

Many people across the United States lack critical access to food. In fact, more than 37 Million Americans face food insecurity. Contributing factors include lack of proximity to groceries, lack of income, and lack of reliable transportation. 

That’s where SNAP comes in. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reached 41.5 million participants nationwide in 2021 — that’s 13% of the U.S. population. Of those, more than 66% of people receiving SNAP food budget supplements included families with children.

Since mobility and transportation challenges are core contributors to food insecurity, the brands of Ahold Delhaize USA; Food Lion, GIANT, Hannaford and Stop & Shop, partnered with Instacart to expand grocery delivery to key populations lacking access to nutritious foods. Today, through Instacart and the brands of Ahold Delhaize USA, eligible consumers can leverage their SNAP benefits when ordering online grocery delivery.

Ahold Delhaize USA seeks a solution for its customers

One of the world leaders in food retail, the brands of Ahold Delhaize USA operate on the East Coast. Many of the states in the company’s market include areas where more than 12% of the population face food insecurity. Determined to remove some of the obstacles for consumers to access nutritious food, the brands of Ahold Delhaize USA partnered with Instacart to overcome transportation and mobility issues and help customers use their EBT SNAP benefits for online delivery orders. 

A collaboration with Instacart to serve the underserved

Coming up with an idea to tackle the issue of food insecurity is one thing; making that plan come to fruition is quite another. 

Adding EBT SNAP to the brands’ grocery-ordering systems took lots of outside-the-box thinking, new systems and infrastructure, and lots of work with government entities and regulatory agencies. The brands of Ahold Delhaize USA initially teamed up with Instacart in 2019 to offer grocery delivery services, but integrating EBT SNAP programs into the system proved more challenging. 

Instacart Platform’s Carrot Payments team collaborated with the Ahold Delhaize USA brands’ teams to help manage certification, integration, and regulatory approvals of the entire process. Without the Instacart collaboration, millions of eligible customers of Food Lion, Hannaford, GIANT and Stop & Shop would not have been able to leverage their EBT SNAP benefits on the Instacart App. 

To get the EBT SNAP payment system running, Instacart had to navigate a number of challenges: 

• Understanding applicable USDA Food & Nutrition Service (FNS) regulations
• Integration of its robust grocery catalog with a USDA-approved payment provider, using Fiserv PaySecure to offer customers of the brands of Ahold Delhaize USA a seamless payment process
• Development of an individual payment infrastructure system to ensure customers could leverage EBT SNAP benefits through the Instacart App 

Rolling out EBT SNAP online payments across Ahold Delhaize USA markets

Once up and running, Instacart enabled online EBT SNAP acceptance with a single banner, but quickly rolled it out across all of Ahold Delhaize USA’s banners.

• On average, 60,000 customers a week used EBT SNAP to order grocery pickup or delivery from the banners of Ahold Delhaize USA on Instacart
• The successful collaboration between Ahold Delhaize USA and Instacart was an early effort to expand EBT SNAP acceptance. 

Instacart has partnered with additional retailers to enable these payment types for grocery delivery. 

• Now, with Carrot Payments, more than 60 retailers and banners accept EBT SNAP payments online across 49 states and Washington, D.C.

• Customers are taking advantage of online EBT SNAP acceptance through the Instacart App, and the Instacart Platform’s white-label e-commerce solutions, Carrot Storefront and Carrot Storefront Pro. 

• By leveraging Carrot Payments across e-commerce experiences, grocers can easily accept new payment types online, including EBT SNAP, Apple Pay, PayPal, and others.

Find out how retailers can leverage technologies to reach more customers in key market areas.  

Instacart

Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.