Más Fresco matched food-stamp dollars on fresh produce one-to-one

Rebeca Gonzalez, a 47-year-old child-care worker in Garden Grove, California, receiving about $500 a month in SNAP benefits, had stopped buying the artichokes and avocados of her Mexican childhood because they cost too much in the US. From February 2017 she enrolled in Más Fresco ('More Fresh'), a federally funded program that gave her an extra $40 a month to spend on produce — and the pomegranates, squashes and artichokes returned to the family cart.

The program was administered and studied by the University of California, San Diego under a $3.4 million USDA grant, open to SNAP households in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties willing to shop at Northgate González Market, an Anaheim-based Latino grocery chain. Participants — 1,153 enrolled by January 2018, 90 percent of them Latino, averaging $329 a month in benefits in households of five or six — received a one-to-one match on produce purchases, capped at $10, $20 or $40 per month, with the ceilings assigned randomly so researchers could isolate which incentive level changed diets.

The design built on USDA-funded pilots elsewhere — Illinois, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New Mexico — and on a 2011 Massachusetts study finding that a 30-cents-on-the-dollar incentive produced about a quarter-cup (26 percent) more fresh produce per day than no incentive. The premise was arithmetic: a Harvard-Brown study had put the yearly cost of a healthful diet at roughly $550 more per person than an unhealthful one.

Match every food-stamp dollar spent on fresh produce one-to-one — capped at $10, $20 or $40 a month — so the healthy choice stops costing more.

It attacked the stated barrier directly — SNAP participants said produce was simply too expensive — rather than educating around it.

The match was delivered inside the existing shopping trip: loyalty cards, itemized receipts, carry-over credits, no new apparatus.

Randomized $10/$20/$40 ceilings turned a benefit program into a dose-finding study other states could copy.

It partnered with a grocer whose customers were 90 percent Latino, meeting a specific community's food culture instead of a generic market.

Price is the diet's gatekeeper: matching dollars on the exact food you want more of moves consumption where exhortation and education fail.

The four-year program was running with 1,153 participants as of the January 2018 NPR report, with UCSD's study ongoing; USDA had funded similar produce-incentive efforts in five other states, and Congress had been debating federal incentives for produce purchases under SNAP.