Fruit & Vegetable Supplemental Benefits
Our Goal
Our goal is to reduce hunger, improve health, and support California’s agricultural economy by making fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits a permanent part of the state’s CalFresh program. The establishment of the CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program was the first step in this direction.
Since its launch, we have co-sponsored multiple bills and budget requests in the California legislature to sustain and expand this program. For this program to reach its full potential and have an even greater impact, California must provide the necessary resources to make it available to CalFresh recipients all throughout the state. The next step towards this goal is to secure stable, long-term funding so that the CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program can become a permanent program and provide ongoing benefits to CalFresh families and California farmers.
Visit the CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program’s website for more information about participating locations and the program’s current status.
Background
Fruit and vegetable supplemental benefit programs, also known as healthy food incentive programs, make healthy food more affordable by providing low-income families with matching dollars when they purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.
In 2017, we launched Double Up Food Bucks, a fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits program offered at select Bay Area retailers to families that used CalFresh, a food assistance program known federally as SNAP, and formerly as food stamps. The program, whose paper-coupon-based design was modeled after a national program developed by the Fair Food Network in Michigan, helped low-income families overcome one of the biggest barriers to accessing healthy food — affordability.
With the passage of AB 1811 in 2018, California established the CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program, which authorized the development of technology that could deliver fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits to CalFresh recipients through the state’s EBT system, the benefits delivery system that allows for CalFresh recipients to access their benefits through a debit-like card. The program officially launched in February 2023 and under this new model, CalFresh families that shop at participating retailers can instantly earn dollar-for-dollar rebates for the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables directly onto their EBT cards, up to $60 per month.
The CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program replaced the paper coupon model, allowing instead for CalFresh families to more easily earn and redeem supplemental benefits with the swipe of their EBT card. The program marks a significant milestone for expanding fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits statewide, as the broad reach and efficiency of the EBT system provides great potential for scaling the program to reach CalFresh families all across the state.
The CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program builds off of research and lessons learned from implementation of similar programs operated at grocery stores and farmers’ markets both in California and across the country.
In the 2008 Farm Bill, the US Department of Food and Agriculture received funding and authority to develop the Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP), an initiative that sought to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption by providing SNAP households with fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits through EBT technology. The HIP project was launched in Massachusetts and ran from 2011 – 2012. Extensive evaluations from this pilot program provided clear evidence that the EBT system could successfully deliver supplemental benefits to SNAP recipients, and that providing low-income families with additional money for purchasing fresh produce led to a nutritionally significant increase in the consumption of fruits and vegetables.
The Evidence
California picked up where Massachusetts left off, and at the time of the CalFresh Fruit & Vegetable EBT Program’s launch, California was the only state in the country where families could earn fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits directly onto their EBT cards. Since then, California has been joined by Rhode Island, Washington State, Colorado, and Louisiana in operating EBT-based fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits programs.
Further evaluations from these initiatives, including Double Up Food Bucks and others nationally, demonstrate broad benefits: they alleviate hunger by providing families with additional dollars that stretch their grocery budgets, support health by making it easier for families to afford healthy options, and provide a boost to California’s agricultural sector.
