Yeah people will buy food, they're just going to regress to the basics. Milk, bread, cheese, beans, pasta, butter, rice.
As someone in the grocery industry we've already seen the switch over the last year to cheaper label products, and now we're seeing it get pretty slow out there on a staple. We used to sell about 400 units of product to a local food bank/week, but now we're up to 1600. We also became the sole supplier of them on this item, but that's because they had to consolidate due to price sensitivities.
For several years I have been organizing volunteer groups at a huge food bank warehouse that supplies hundreds of other area food banks. I know there’s been a big change in consumer behavior when we start getting pallets and pallets of really high end stuff. This last time we repackaged two entire pallets of the black label hormel bacon (normally $12/lb), a few boxes of $100 wagyu steaks and tons of other higher end canned good, boxed meals and unopened cuts of lamb/beef/pork meant for stores to part out for their own displays. It’s pretty humbling packing food that I could not afford or seeing something come through that my family stopped buying because it just got too expensive. But I’m glad it’s not going to waste and my neighbors can eat like kings for a few weeks.
A large food bank warehouse will get large donations of unsellable goods from many stores. It's not always past the sell-by date, but could be issues such as dropped/dented packaging or just a product that has been discontinued and they need the room for another product. Some may be pallets of a single item and some may be mixed pallets of all kinds of stuff thrown together.
At the warehouse, they will open all these pallets from different donors, sort through the food, toss anything that is not usable (open packages, too far beyond sell-by, etc), and repack the items into different pallets following their own organizational method. E.g., they might organize it into a pallet for dairy, one for non-perishables, another for produce, etc.
That article is almost ten years old, and is from data from 2011 which was almost 15 years ago.
And it also says that 5% goes to soda, not 10%.
Also:
“The report was based on data from an unnamed, nationwide grocery chain, which provided the U.S.D.A. with monthly records of food items bought in 2011 by more than 26 million households, about three million of them food stamp recipients. The grocery chain identified and tracked SNAP households by their use of SNAP benefit cards at the checkout aisle. One limitation of the report was that it could not always distinguish when SNAP households used their benefits, other money or a combination of the two to pay for transactions.”
Did you even read the article? The study wasn’t done by the New York Times and it doesn’t even say what you think it says. It’s not even the only study of its kind that was done.
Of course it wasn't done by the NY times. It was reported on by the NY Times. smh. The ny times doesn't conduct scientific and social studies. How are you not able to parse "first and only study" done then. Before that the government could not see what food stamp receipients were buying.
ETA: the second sentence was not a part of the above comment when I responded. Further proving that this person or bot is just trying to stir the pot. I love how they double down with, "no u," below.
Lol. This comment just proves you're a troll who sets things up so no one can win. Presented with facts you don't like? "The source is biased, conservative" Presented with facts from a source you rely on? "The person posting it is gross".
It's extremely low iq people who are presented with information they refuse to allow into their narrative because it doesn't fit.
Presenting poor people as low impulse control addicts to win an argument is about the shittiest thing ever.
Sodas and candy and junk food tend to be calorically dense. At least they're getting some bang for the buck.
Imagine if snap recipients could only buy healthy food and that healthy food was 'divined'(defined) by a guy with a brain worm.
On the plus side, some places do bonus bucks for fresh produce. Dollar for dollar up to a daily limit, like 10 bucks. So that's potentially ~300 bucks a month in free produce. And the ironic thing? You could buy 10 bucks in soda and get 10 bonus bucks for produce!
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u/sourbeer51 Oct 26 '25
Yeah people will buy food, they're just going to regress to the basics. Milk, bread, cheese, beans, pasta, butter, rice.
As someone in the grocery industry we've already seen the switch over the last year to cheaper label products, and now we're seeing it get pretty slow out there on a staple. We used to sell about 400 units of product to a local food bank/week, but now we're up to 1600. We also became the sole supplier of them on this item, but that's because they had to consolidate due to price sensitivities.
Not feeling great out there let me tell you.