Florida SNAP recipients began facing new limits on what their benefits can buy Monday, and one Pensacola grocery store spent days sorting through thousands of products to make sure the register would match the new rules. Grocery Advantage said it had to pull 7,000 to 8,000 items from the approved list in its system before the changes took effect.
Mark Fisher, who works at the store, said the team was reading labels one by one to figure out which products still qualified. “There's a little education that has to go on with us as we were looking, reading labels,” he said. “We're reading the Little Debbie labels and the Hostess labels and seeing which ones could fit and which ones couldn't.”
Florida joined the list of states restricting products like candy and soda, and under the new rules, soda, many energy drinks, candy and ultra-processed desserts are no longer covered under the SNAP program. Fisher said the store had to make case-by-case decisions on some cookie and dessert items because the guidelines were not always clear. He said staff members were prepared to help shoppers adjust their grocery lists at the checkout line rather than leave them guessing in front of the register.
“We want to give the people that are using SNAP at the time all the products they can get,” Fisher said. “We also want to stay within the guidelines that SNAP provides.” He said he did not expect much confusion at the cash register, adding, “The people at SNAP recipients pretty much understand what's going on,” but acknowledged, “Now, there'll be some fine tuning with cookie products and individual things that have not been actually spelled out to them.”
The store expects the new limits to change what many shoppers put in their carts. Fisher said he thinks Grocery Advantage will sell more water, meat and produce because those are still available to SNAP shoppers, and he cast the shift as a move toward healthier options. “I think we're going to sell a bunch more water, and I think we're going to sell more meat and more produce just because that's what they're going to be able to buy on that,” he said. “That's what we're trying to get to as healthy alternatives.”
WEAR News had previously spoken with customers when the changes were first announced, and reactions were mixed, with some shoppers welcoming the push toward healthier food and others questioning how the rules would work in practice. For now, the bigger test is not whether the limits exist — they do — but whether stores and shoppers can keep pace with the fine print item by item.
