(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
The Hub on the Hill in Essex, N.Y., is part local grocery store, part food hub and distribution center, part commercial kitchen and partly a place for food-based companies to experiment, store, distribute or sell their products (Dak Bars are made in the Hub).
During the pandemic, the Hub and the nonprofit AdkAction, helped distribute emergency food packages to people in need throughout the Adirondack Park. In early 2021, AdkAction won approval to operate an online shopping experience for people who receive SNAP (formerly “food stamps”) benefits, about 20,000 families at the time, and the payments could be made with handheld, remote card readers.
[Read more about AdkAction and SNAP benefits here.]
Now, the two groups have won approval with the help of software companies to take it a step further and receive SNAP payments online, using a person's EBT, or electronic benefit transfer card.
It has taken at least two years for this to come to pass, and the first The Hub on the Hill is the first food hub in the nation to do this.
“We’re fortunate to be the guinea pigs for what I think a lot of food hubs want,” said Linsay Willemain, Hub’s executive director. The Hub is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. “As an eCommerce site, as a SNAP online vendor — Forage and Grocerist, thanks to A.D.K. Action — they’re working really, really hard to give us a highly customized, highly effective product that they can then sell to other food hubs.”
Grocerist is the online sales website software, and Forage is a payment processor aimed especially at working with the USDA and the Food Nutrition Service, which oversees SNAP.
The process was formidable both Willemain and AdkAction’s Sawyer Cresap said.
“Forage had never done this before,” Willemain said, adding that the two software companies worked together and with FNS to make it easier for the next food hub to implement the process. AdkAction and Hub have created a manual for other food hubs to follow.
Neither Forage nor Grocerist can take a portion of the payment as a bank might. Instead, they are on a set, annual contract with Hub.
The foods purchased must be SNAP eligible, and so do the prices. The Federal government needs to see inside the process to make sure all of the money is being spent properly. Over the two years, the rules and regulations shifted as Forage and Grocerist worked to make the software work, Cresap and Willemain said.
“There are so many restrictions,” Cresap said. Hub and AdkAction have created a manual for other food hubs to follow because it has been such a long, convoluted process.
The New York Health Foundation helped pay for this, Cresap said.
Only 30 vendors in the state take SNAP EBT cards online, and those include powerhouses such as Walmart and Amazon.
“A.D.K. Action has really helped shape our future,” Willemain, the Hub director, said.
“We’ve gotten to this point where we have all this capacity [to produce and distribute], and help the farms to build this capacity,” Willemain said. Now the next step is to focus on access and affordability, or what she called “food equity.”
The aim for both organizations is to use locally-sourced food as much as possible and to give growers and producers a market for a sustainable, resilient food production in the Adirondack Park, Cresap said.
“We’re hoping now with SNAP online, the Fair Food Program will go even farther,” Cresap said, referring to AdkAction’s program that targets low income families. They use a United Way metric called ALICE, or Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained Employed, to determine who is eligible for the help. Some already have SNAP benefits and some have incomes slightly above federal limits.
“If you’ve got kids, SNAP is not going to cover everything for you,” Cresap said.