“SNAP has moved away from primarily serving families with children toward serving households without children, particularly those consisting of just one person,” an analysis from The Institute for Family Studies observes, giving us some food-for-thought on what these changing demographics of SNAP beneficiaries could mean for the health and well-being of people in the U.S.
The Institute looked at data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and graphed this top-line trend of households with children declining as a percent of SNAP households compared with growth among households without children.
SNAP has significant grown overall in terms of participants and the costs of the program: according to IFS, the population receiving SNAP benefits doubled over the past two decades.
But IFS adds: “This overall growth masks profound shifts in the composition of SNAP households.”
That shift is shown in the second graph, SNAP households as a share of their household type.
In 2000, the share of households that had children in them was equivalent to the share of one-person households.
By 2010, we begin to see some divergence between these two household types, and by 2023 the largest disparity between households with kids and one-personal households: 1 in 3 SNAP households were single persons only, and just over one-fifth were households with children, according to the Census Bureau family household statistics couple with USDA SNAP data/
Health Populi’s Hot Points: Circana and FMI have been convening updates on “Top Trends in Fresh” this year, the second of which was broadcast on 4 September. This session addressed Top Trends in Fresh: Living Well in Turbulent Times, Jonna Parker VP of Fresh with Circana discussed the company’s market research into the SNAP program with that lens on fresh food and nutrition.
She summarized impacts on SNAP from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) which is having and will have many impacts on the health/care ecosystem and throughout the U.S. economy. In her slide shown here, we see six specific factors being re-shaped by the Bill, starting with a big Federal funding cut to the SNAP program, then rippling to administrative cost-sharing with States, reducing future benefit group, enforcing work requirements among beneficiaries, cost-sharing with States, and sixth, cutting the SNAP-Ed program (which funded nutrition education programs through food banks, public health departments, colleges and other sites to bolster nutrition literacy among SNAP beneficiaries — such as how to cook more health-fully with value-priced ingredients, how to read food labels, and other topics meant to empower food insecure health citizens). 
It’s interesting to note from Jonna’s Circana data that SNAP Households’ share of grocery spending had double-digit growth in the fresh food aisle at food retailers (see the fourth circle on the right in this chart).
SNAP benefit cuts don’t just impact the demand side for (healthy) food, but the supply side of grocery and retail outlets channeling food to communities. An analysis from The Center for American Progress estimated that some 27,000 retail food stores would be negatively impacted by the OBBBA SNAP cuts. Some stores in low-income neighborhoods have more than 50 percent SNAP sales. A 20 percent cut to SNAP would make it very difficult for stores like this, in food deserts, to remain open,” Stephanie Johnson of the National Grocers Association told the CAP researchers.
One (of several) solutions to the food desert challenge can be leveraging direct-to-consumer delivery services for food, such as Instacart and various grocery store programs that accept electronic benefits from SNAP and match them to program beneficiaries for food delivery. Instacart et. al. are growing their expertise in health and nutrition, and collaborating with Medicaid plans in certain states as well as regional health care providers. This can help solve some of the gap when local brick-and-mortar stores aren’t available in rural and nutritionally-underserved communities.
This is but a partial Band-Aid tactic in a larger ecosystem of problems and barriers facing health citizens, however. Home delivery of nutritious food helps on the food security side of that equation; however, risks of the social determinants of health tend to travel in groups, I often quip. And a companion issue in this discussion is the fraying of social fabric in communities, where loneliness plays a part in eroding mental health across the U.S.
In March, I wrote here in Health Populi about the U.S. phenomenon of people moving from “Bowling Alone to Eating Alone.”
Robert Putnam presciently saw the coming of America’s fraying social fabric and growing loneliness epidemic in his must-read book — still incredibly resonant and relevant 25 years later.
But 25 years later, we know from the National Restaurant Association’s trend tracking that more people are eating alone — with most food ordered from restaurants in 2023 taken off-premises. Increasingly people are eating not socially but alone with technology — whether streaming movies, watching TV, or working at their desks on laptops.
As we consider the growing SNAP program beneficiary living alone, we can connect the dots between food and loneliness and see an opportunity to bridge that gap and solve more than one challenge with creative solutions. In the current political landscape and harsh impacts of the OBBBA across a broad health/care landscape and ecosystem, private sector stakeholders in health and well-being have important roles to play to bolster individual and public health — while bolstering business models and profitability as health-seeking consumers across income-levels and behaviors demand more nutritious food to feed personal health goals.
