Online Toolkit Offers Guidance to Grantees Seeking Grocery Partners

Nutrition incentive practitioners looking for grocery retailer partners can find resources in a newly completed toolkit available to program grantees.

The toolkit was put together to help GusNIP grant recipients, or grantees, acclimate themselves to the challenges involved in partnering with grocery stores.  It contains 54 resources, including project planning guidance, information on point-of-sale technology, background on the grocery industry and more, including a grocery project-planning tool. It can be found on the site of the Nutrition Incentive Hub, a partner of the National Grocers Association Foundation Technical Assistance Center (NGAF TA Center).

“This toolkit is a valuable resource for grantees seeking to establish partnerships with retail grocers in order to make nutrition benefits available to those in need within their communities,” said Josh Anderegg, project director at the TA Center. “It gives them a jump start with templates, checklists and other resources so that they can focus their efforts into building and strengthening relationships with retailers and farmers market sites.”

Over the last 4-year grant term, the NGAF TA Center has assisted in the development and implementation of nutrition incentive and produce prescription solutions with nine technology providers – including AppCard, ECRS and DUMAC/RORC – all successfully running in grocery stores. Since the center started offering technical assistance, hundreds of retail stores have been able to engage in GusNIP partnerships, including Tops Friendly Markets, Charley Family Shop n’ Save and Stoodt’s Fresh Market.

The TA Center assisted Auburn University’s Hunger Solutions Institute in its successful GusNIP application, which now partners with four grocers in the state of Alabama.

“And the work is not finished,” Anderegg noted. “We are currently working to implement nutrition incentive and produce prescriptions in more than 10 stores and chains throughout the country, we maintain active conversations with numerous POS technology companies developing solutions for grocers, and we’ve been offering guidance to GusNIP applicants on writing partnership with grocers into their grant applications.”

The NGA Foundation has operated the Technical Assistance Center since 2019, when the Nutrition Incentive Hub was selected to receive funding through the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The same grant provides funding to grantees to offer nutrition incentive and produce prescriptions for SNAP customers and others who qualify for SNAP benefits. In 2023, NGAF added a second subject area to its Technical Assistance Center, SNAP Online, as it operates the SNAP EBT Modernization Technical Assistance Center.