Grocery news: New SNAP stocking rules may harm convenience stores | The Homepage

Also: Giant Eagle says Kroger deal won’t affect Mobile Market; planned grocery co-op funding delay puts project at risk

A shopper at the Giant Eagle Mobile Market leaves with her groceries on the service’s first day in Hazelwood in 2023. The Mobile Market is in Hazelwood on Saturdays and Glen Hazel on Wednesdays. Photo by Juliet Martinez

By Managing Editor Juliet Martinez

New rules for stores accepting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments will require them to stock more kinds of foods. The program is also called SNAP or food stamps. But advocates say convenience stores and small markets that serve places like Hazelwood without a full-service grocery store could be at risk of losing the ability to accept SNAP payments. This would cost them a significant part of their revenue and deprive SNAP users access to food.

“SNAP authorized retailers accept over $90 billion a year, or $236 million a day, in taxpayer dollars — USDA is making sure they’re actually in the business of selling food,” said a May 7 statement from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins.

“This rule puts real food back at the center of SNAP,” said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a press release. The change, he said, “demands more from retailers and delivers better options for the families who depend on this program.”

But food justice advocates are concerned about how this will affect small grocery stores. Neighborhood markets and convenience stores sell items like milk and bread, allowing people to buy those staples in between big shopping trips.

“The guidelines don’t necessarily line up with the way that people eat or the way that people shop from small retailers,” Dawn Marie Clepper-Hall, director of community food access for Pittsburgh-based anti-hunger group Just Harvest told WESA news on June 30.

The new rules say grocers that accept SNAP payments must carry seven varieties of each category of staple foods. These categories are dairy, fruits, grains, protein and vegetables.

“If I ask you right now what are the seven grains you would buy from your local convenience store, you would probably think that was a really weird question, and I think you might struggle to get to seven when you were counting them,” Mx. Clepper-Hall said.

 Pennsylvania has roughly 10,000 SNAP retailers. About 3,000 of those are convenience stores. People tend to shop at these stores when they need to buy food between larger supermarket trips, Mx. Clepper-Hall said.

“The idea that corner stores stocking rice flour to meet this stocking requirement is going to start, you know, motivating people to cook with rice flour, and that people are going to want to buy that from the convenience store in the first place, I think is pretty misguided,” they said.

Dianne Shenk, owner of Dylamato’s Market at 5414 Second Ave., said the new rules are designed to make it harder for small food retailers to accept SNAP payments. Large retailers like Walmart will get more of the SNAP dollars as a result, even though this will make getting food harder for people who rely on the program.

“What do you do when you forgot one ingredient for your recipe, or you open something and it’s spoiled? When you have to take a bus (which costs a bus fare) and you don’t even have the money for the item that’s right there in the corner store, this is a no-win situation even if you have enough SNAP to get what you need,” she wrote in a July 15 email.

The hardest of the new rules is the one that relates to dairy products.

“It’s difficult to have that much variety within the allowed limits, and to expect to be able to sell that much variety before things begin to time out and you have spoilage,” she said.

Dylamato’s Market is in a good position to continue accepting SNAP payments, which make up about 20% of the store’s revenue, Ms. Shenk said. But stores that are less focused on staple foods are unlikely to be able to keep up with the new rules.

“My ability to accept SNAP should not come into question, but there’s no doubt the corporate food system would like for even very small stores such as mine to stop taking SNAP and is pushing these kinds of ‘healthy foods’ requirements to try to make that happen,” she wrote.

The Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association wrote in a public comment to the USDA that complying with the new regulations would be extremely difficult.

“For something like a gallon of milk or eggs, a convenience store serves an important purpose when a grocery may be an hour’s drive or several bus trips away. But because of their small footprint, these kinds of stores may simply not be able to meet the new requirements,” according to the organization.

Grocery co-op project

The group working to build a cooperative grocery store on the 4800 block of Second Avenue in Hazelwood no longer has control over the land where they want to build it. The Hazelwood-based nonprofit People of Origin Rightfully Loved and Wanted, known as POORLAW, spearheads the project. The planned development is named after the late Hazelwood community organizer Sarah Dixon.

The Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority gave the Sarah Dixon Innovation Center project control of the parcels in 2021. That control ended on June 30 because the authority’s fundraising requirements were not met.

POORLAW met with Mayor Corey O’Connor on June 24 to ask him to support the group’s request for an extension. According to Founder and CEO Saundra Cole-McKamey, Mr. O’Connor suggested the group issue a request for proposals to find a private developer to partner with.

POORLAW also arranged for the Mobile Market to visit Hazelwood and Glen Hazel as part of its food justice work. Visit poorlaw.org to learn more.

Mobile Market will continue

Grocery conglomerate Kroger announced in July that it will buy the Giant Eagle chain next year. In response to an inquiry from The Homepage, Jannah Drexler, Giant Eagle public relations manager, wrote in a July 10 email that the Mobile Market will continue to serve Hazelwood and Glen Hazel without interruption.

The Mobile Market visits Hazelwood on Saturdays and Glen Hazel on Wednesdays.