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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

SNAP

All_EBT Offers New Tool to Help SNAP Recipients Budget Purchases

Among the many, many (many!) problems caused by the government shutdown, the 39 million people on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) face an additional issue: they got their money early.

Typically earlier is better. But in this case, because of the shutdown and the machinations the Department of Agriculture put in place to fund the program, February benefits started being paid out last week, much earlier than normal. This earlier-than-normal distribution has states warning SNAP recipients that they’ll need to budget their purchases to last throughout February, if not longer should the shutdown continue so that funds are not available for March.

To help with that budgeting, All_ebt, which uses a combination of Facebook Messenger and virtual Visa cards so SNAP recipients can shop for groceries online, has launched a new tool to help those on food stamps plan ahead.

“Just within the last two weeks, there’s been a flood of people registered and signed up [for All_ebt],” said Eli Calderón Morin, Founder and CEO of All_ebt. “Now they are nervous about their benefits. How do they better control their spending?”

To access the new feature, those registered with All_ebt just need to send the company a note through the All_ebt Facebook Messenger bot asking for the feature to be turned on. Once activated, the budgeting feature does two things.

First, users can set the service up to receive notifications about their EBT balance either through Facebook Messenger or the All_ebt Android app. Users set the notification frequency to be daily, weekly or monthly to get running reminders of how much SNAP money they have remaining.

“Right now, they have no easy way to check their budget,” Calderón Morin said. “They have to call a 1-800 number and sit on the phone for ten minutes. There’s no way to get a daily notification saying ‘How much budget do I have left?'”

In addition to notifications, users can also set up a budget in All_ebt through Messenger or the app. Because All_ebt knows all about how much their users receive in benefits, the company can set up a spending plan for them. Additionally, it can provide users with a pie chart of how they are actually spending their money.

Without providing specifics, Calderón Morin says that All_ebt has grown and now serves people in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. He said that a “high percentage” of people on All_ebt have disabilities and are relying on the company’s technology to get the food they need. He also said that Amazon and Instacart are the top two places where All_ebt users grocery shop.

Though the shutdown has no end in sight, All_ebt is providing tools so people on food stamps can see–and plan for– their own situations a little more clearly.

All_ebt to Open Second Pop-Up Store, Has Amazon Go-Like Ambitions

All_ebt, the Los Angeles startup that helps people on food stamps purchase groceries and other approved goods online, is going bi-coastal and adding a second pop-up store in Charlotte, NC this summer.

These pop-up stores are small, temporary and don’t carry a ton of inventory. Their primary mission is community outreach, and providing a physical place where low income families can come in and get in-person training on how to use All_ebt’s online payment system.

We wrote about All_ebt’s mission to expand the shopping options for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants earlier this year. The company uses Facebook Messenger and virtual Visa cards to allow low-income people to more fully participate in the digital economy by giving them the ability to shop online at places like Amazon Fresh or Safeway–something they can’t do directly with their benefits card.

“The people that are on food stamps aren’t ignorant,” said All_ebt Founder Eli Calderón Morin, “They have a higher capacity for technology than we assume. They use mobile differently because it’s their primary device.”

The new Charlotte pop-up store will open on June 15th in the Packard Place building. It will carry roughly 90 different Women, Infant, Children (WIC) items (milk, cheese, produce), and Morin said that the Charlotte City Council has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project. From there, Morin plans to open up even more temporary pop-up stores around the country.

But Morin isn’t just looking at geographic expansion, he’s also thinking quite a bit about the future of payments. All_ebt was accepted into the Queen City Fintech accelerator program (which also happens to be at Packard Place). That acceptance came with a $20,000 check that Morin will use to help build out the service, part of which includes adding computer vision talent to his roster. Morin wants that expertise to help build out an Amazon Go-like experience for SNAP participants.

With all these efforts, Morin is attempting to use technology to help remove the stigma and, in doing so, any embarrassment that can arise when shopping with food stamps. By opening up shopping opportunities online, low income families can shop from the privacy of their home. By connecting All_ebt with computer vision-driven Amazon Go-like payment systems, SNAP participants can grab what they need and go without having to go through any potentially complex administrative process of paying with food stamps at the checkout.

But Morin admits that an Amazon Go-like ideal experience is still years down the road. A more immediate use for computer vision was just created at the recent Facebook F8 hackathon, where All_ebt built a way for customers to use the cameras on their phones to get nutritional information and other data about items, including produce. That feature won the company another $3,000 for its coffers.

All_ebt’s work comes at an ominous time for SNAP participants. The new farm bill making its way through Congress would impose stricter work requirements for recipients. In February, the Trump administration suggested replacing some food stamps with boxed delivery of food. And more recently, the startup Propel, which let food stamp recipients check their account balance, has been hobbled as it ran into trouble with a government food stamp database contractor.

All of this actually makes Morin’s work more important, and thanks to All_ebt’s worth with the accelerator and Facebook, that work will become more widespread.

Trump’s Meals in a Box Plan for SNAP Participants is Full of Baloney

In an effort to cut spending on food assistance to low-income families, the Trump administration has proposed replacing some food stamps with a meal delivery type service. The Supplemental Nutrition Assitance Program (SNAP), often colloquially referred to as food stamps, provide a monthly supplement for purchasing healthy food to eligible, low-income families.

Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said these meal deliveries would be akin to Blue Apron, but the comparison is downright laughable when you look at what the government actually proposes.

Blue Apron customers get to choose their meals and receive insulated boxes of fresh proteins and vegetables. According to The Washington Post, recipients of “America’s Harvest Boxes” would get “shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables.” All these items would be homegrown by “American farmers and producers” for that added jingoistic je ne sais quoi.

For households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits (that’s 81% of SNAP households overall), half of those benefits would come in the form of these government-provided boxes.

Mulvaney defends the approach, saying that the government can buy food wholesale at a low cost, which is more economical than having people buy it directly at retail. Which technically may be true, but critics were quick to point out many of the problems with this Harvest Box approach.

Then there are the retailers. Walmart and Target could lose billions with these proposed cuts to food stamp purchases, and it would certainly hurt the new USDA pilot program set to launch later this year that allows food stamp purchases to be made with retailers online.

And that doesn’t even touch on the logistics and expense of having the government oversee preparation and shipping of millions of boxes on time on a regular basis.

To be sure, the food stamp program in America needs to be updated and improved. And there are startups such as All_ebt out there trying to make it easier for SNAP participants to access more options for fresher, healthier food through online food deliveries.

“We are going backwards in terms of technology,” said All_ebt founder Eli Calderón Morin told me by phone. “Fundamentally, I don’t think we should try to police what people eat.” Morin believes the conversation should be changed from punishing people simply because they are poor to empowering people to make better financial and healthier choices—which isn’t going to happen if the government takes those choices and boxes them up.

All_ebt Enables Online Grocery Purchases for those on Food Stamps

The new Amazon Go here in Seattle generated a lot of buzz when it opened last month. And while the store is a miracle of technology, it’s yet another venue where people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, can’t shop.

It’s modern roadblocks like this that caused Eli Calderón Morin to co-found All_ebt, a Los Angeles-based startup that helps people on food stamps participate in the digital economy that so often leaves them behind. Approximately 43 million Americans receive SNAP assistance, with money delivered via an electronic benefits transfer (EBT) card to facilitate payments. The problem is that currently, these EBT cards can only be used in select physical stores at the point of sale, and not online.

According to Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center:

  • 23.5 million people live in low-income areas more than one mile from a supermarket.
  • Low-income zip codes have 30 percent more convenience stores, which tend to lack healthy items, than middle-income zip codes.

The ability for SNAP participants to order groceries via delivery from places like Amazon Fresh or even Safeway online provides a new avenue for people to access healthier food.

All_ebt wants to become a payment platform for EBT transactions. The first step in this process has been the creation of a Facebook Messenger app. To use it, SNAP participants create an All_ebt account and upload a picture of their EBT card or WIC coupon. Once created, users are issued a virtual wallet that can be used to buy food online.

So, when a user needs $50 for groceries, All_ebt is authorized to charge that EBT card $50. All_ebt then provides $50 for use in the new virtual wallet. Morin is quick to point out that money is not being transferred, and purchases made via All_ebt must still adhere to the purchasing restrictions that come with any EBT purchase (no alcohol, no tobacco,  etc.).

Morin wants everyone to have the same opportunity to eat healthier food. To help people even more, All_ebt has set up a pop-up location in East LA, complete with a mini supermarket to sign people up and show them how to use the service. Morin wouldn’t give specific numbers, but says that they sign up 5–10 people a day.

Providing access to online transactions for lower income households has also caught the attention of the government, which announced a SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot last year. Retailers such as Amazon, Safeway and Wal-Mart are participants in the program. The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service expects the pilot to launch in 2018.

All_ebt was part of the Visa developer program and was a finalist in the Visa Platform Challenge. The company is bootstrapped, with seven people working there, and has begun the search for investors. While All_ebt is currently refining its business model, Morin says they want to become like Braintree and Stripe for EBT transactions, and want to have merchants pay the transaction fee.

Like so many things these days, the very idea of food stamps has become highly politicized. Regardless of your party affiliation, All_ebt’s mission to make healthy food more available to everyone is a good one and a goal worth supporting.