September 2022 marked the momentous release of the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service report titled “Leveraging the White House Conference to Promote and Elevate Nutrition Security: The Role of the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.” This publication was issued in conjunction with the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, spotlighting the agency’s initiatives in supporting President Biden’s ambitious agenda.

The President has put forth an aggressive goal aiming to exterminate hunger, reduce diet-related illnesses by promoting healthier eating habits and physical activity, and eradicate disparities linked to these realms by the year 2030. The USDA, through its Food and Nutrition Service, has been a vital instrument in working towards these objectives.

A year has passed since the unveiling of these efforts, and the milestones achieved thus far paint an optimistic picture, catalyzing a joyous celebration. The progress made towards bolstering food and nutrition security has been significant and commendable, yet the USDA is far from complacent.

Looking forward, the agency is laser-focused on additional strategies to be actioned, eyes set firmly on the horizon. The mission to ensure nutritional security and tackle hunger head-on remains a priority as they strive to realize President Biden’s visionary objectives.

Pillar 1: Focuses on improving food accessibility and affordability:
Eradicate hunger by ensuring all – those residing in urban, suburban, rural, tribal communities, and territories – have easy and affordable access to food.

Summer 2023 saw the majority of states harness a newly available option in USDA’s summer meal programs, permitting meals to be served “to-go” or delivered in rural locales where facilitating onsite meals poses a significant challenge. This new policy potentially catered to an estimated 8 million children in rural districts.

In collaboration with state and tribal associates, the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) is actively engaged in setting up the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer Program. This initiative will offer grocery benefits during the summer to families whose children are eligible for free, or price-reduced school meals. The fully implemented program is projected to serve more than 29 million children, providing a whopping total of over $3.5 billion in annual benefits.

Online shopping with SNAP benefits is now operational across all fifty states as well as the District of Columbia. Approximately 4 million SNAP households were observed shopping online in August 2023 alone. The FNS is working towards replicating the same for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), offering financial support and technical assistance to state agencies, and actively removing regulatory hurdles.

To further simplify matters, FNS has undertaken a mobile payment pilot project in five states. Additionally, their partnership with the National Association of Farmers Market Nutrition Program’s MarketLink’s Online SNAP solution has enabled small farmers to accept electronic SNAP benefits which, in return, have acted as a catalyst in increasing SNAP customer base and granting them better access to fresh, locally cultivated produce.

Efforts for modernizing WIC and the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program are also underway through several initiatives. These aim to bolster involvement, retention, and benefit redemption, as well as promote fairness.

Expansion of the Community Eligibility Provision is giving more schools in the high-need areas the ability to provide breakfast and lunch to all students at no cost.

Through measures such as annual inflation adjustments and the provision of Supply Chain Assistance funds, the FNS can lend schools 50 cents more per lunch and 18 cents more per school breakfast for the 2023-24 school year compared to the base reimbursement rates of the previous school year.

The agency increased support to schools for introducing traditional Indigenous foods into child nutrition programs. For example, a consolidated website has been introduced, containing assistance resources making it simpler to incorporate Indigenous food into meals.

Furthermore, an extra $30 million was awarded in grant funds by the FNS to aid schools around the nation in purchasing necessary equipment to prepare and serve nutritious meals that comply with the USDA’s nutritional standards.

In fiscal year 2023, the FNS handed out nearly $11 million in funds to 103 projects across the country as part of the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant Program. These investments are expected to provide nutritious foods for 1.2 million children, support local farmers and producers, and reach nearly 3,000 schools in 40 states and Guam.

The FNS also granted close to $100 million in The Emergency Food Assistance Program Reach and Resiliency grants to extend the program to underserved remote, rural, tribal, and low-income areas.

Another $10 million was granted by the FNS to support the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations Self-Determination Demonstration Projects. This allowed 16 tribal nations to contract for some of the foods in the program to better suit their dietary preferences, including traditional foods.

The agency also facilitated $9.4 million via the Team Nutrition Grants to endorse schools and states in their nutrition education efforts, encouraging healthy eating habits among children from kindergarten through grade 12.

Lastly, the FNS collaborated with tribes to expand the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) food package, effective from September 1, 2023. This included improvements like a nearly 40% increase in vegetables, doubling the quantity of eggs, and including bison stew meat as an option.

Pillar 2: Focuses on Integrating Nutrition and Health

The focus lies on emphasizing nutrition and food security’s central role in overall health, including disease prevention and handling. The overarching goal is to ensure that everyone’s nutritional needs are duly taken into account by the healthcare system.

The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) is collaborating with the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and its network of Minority Serving Institutions. The objective of this cooperative effort is crafting a national workforce strategy for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. This plan aims to provide better support to WIC staff and ensure the program delivers skilled and culturally appropriate care for families participating in WIC.

Weeks after the historical White House Conference, the FNS hosted its inaugural National Nutrition Security and Healthcare Summit. The event saw participation from more than 200 leaders from the health care sector, federal agencies, and the wider community.

Following the summit, FNS has been jointly working with ProMedica and The Root Cause Coalition on organizing seven regional summits. Taken as a whole, these monumental events have played a key role in identifying strategies to fortify the integration of federal nutrition assistance programs with the health care sector.

Pillar 3 : Centered on Empowering All Consumers to Access and Make Healthy Choices

Initiatives are in place to cultivate environments where everyone, irrespective of their background, can effortlessly make informed, healthy choices. This involves enhancing access to healthy food, encouraging healthy policies in workplaces and schools, and investing in culturally sensitive and appropriately targeted public education campaigns.

In line with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and robust stakeholder input, the FNS proposed modifications to school nutrition standards. The suggested updates encompass gradual reductions in added sugars and sodium, together with an emphasis on primarily whole grain products. The agency is presently reviewing over 136,000 public remarks received in response to the proposed regulation and is projected to publish a final ruling in 2024. These changes will be phase-introduced to optimally support healthy children.

FNS proposed comprehensive and scientifically grounded revisions to the WIC food packages. The aim is to support access to healthy foods that accord with the latest nutritional science and increase access to culturally appropriate foods, as well as support breastfeeding objectives.

Through SNAP healthy incentive programs such as the Electronic Healthy Incentives Pilot (eHIP) and Healthy Fluid Milk Incentive projects, FNS encourages healthy eating across all life stages. The eHIP’s primary aim is to deliver incentives more efficiently for SNAP members purchasing nutritious foods through electronic means. The 2023 Healthy Fluid Milk Incentive grant also utilizes electronic incentive delivery to boost incentive redemption and reach.

The FNS awarded nearly $30 million in grants for food service modernization and nutritious meal provision to 264 small or rural school districts across 44 states and the District of Columbia, targeting some of the highest-need schools.

The FNS granted $50 million to four organizations in cooperative agreements for local and regional food system support, school food procurement route expansion, supporter organization engagement, and balancing of regional and national focus for school food system transformation. They are expected to offer sub-grants beginning in the early 2024 fiscal year.

FNS is providing centralized consumer information for income-eligible households through the ‘Shop Simple with MyPlate’ app, and has newly extended MyPlate’s social media presence to Instagram to engage more audiences with healthy eating information and tips.

Training courses were provided by the FNS for regional and state partners on coalition-building and the role of SNAP Education (commonly known as SNAP-Ed) within the State Nutrition Action Councils.

FNS’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) is updating the Dietary Guidelines for Americans for 2025-2030 in collaboration with the US Department of Health and Human Services, converting the guidelines into actionable client messages, content, and tools to serve the public.

Each year, FNS invests roughly $1 billion in nutrition education and promotion across its programs, including SNAP-Ed, WIC nutrition education and counseling, Team Nutrition, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, and MyPlate.

An overhauled SNAP-Ed Connection website was launched by FNS to improve access to evidence-based nutrition resources, share best practices, and better support nutrition education programs. The site now includes budget-friendly and culturally appropriate recipes and shares data on the impact of SNAP-Ed.

Finally, FNS finalized an evaluation of equity in the delivery of SNAP-Ed services, yielding actionable recommendations currently being employed to develop resources, conduct training, and provide technical assistance to enhance program access for historically underserved audiences.

Pillar 4 ‘Support Physical Activity for All,’

Efforts are geared towards fostering an environment where everyone can engage in physical activity with relative ease. Steps include ensuring all individuals can access safe environments for exercise, raising awareness about the importance of physical activity, and conducting research and measurement of physical activity.

The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) consistently shares resources related to physical activity via platforms like the SNAP-Ed Connection website and SNAP-Ed e-bulletins. The website provides valuable tips and information from federal, state, and local authorities.

Users can also explore the freshly revamped SNAP-Ed Library on the site, which sports an array of educational materials and success stories, catering further to the aims of the pillar and the overarching mission of elevating community health and wellness.

Pillar 5: Enhances Nutrition and Food Security Research,

The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) has amped up efforts to refine nutrition metrics, data collection, and research. The objective? To provide vital information for shaping nutrition and food security policies, with a distinctive focus on equity, access, and disparities.

One of the highlights of the FNS’s recent endeavors is the publication of several research studies on important topics such as:

• SNAP mobile communication strategies, where the best practices among state agencies using mobile technology to facilitate participants’ access to program information were identified.
• Operations of child nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic, which honed in on the challenges and opportunities encountered by school food authorities at the various stages of the pandemic.
• Early adoption of the SNAP online purchasing pilot.
• Oversight of the Summer Food Service Program by state agencies.

The FNS is also initiating or planning an array of studies on:

• The impact of recent adjustments to SNAP benefits.
• WIC feeding practices and participant experiences over time, starting from birth.
• SNAP households’ food purchases, dietary intake, mobile or online payments, and utilization of SNAP-Ed on a year-over-year basis.
• Modifications to school meal nutrition standards and the cost of school meals. This includes studying school food procurement distribution issues to understand the complications schools face.
• FDPIR 638 Self-Determination Project to identify the lessons learned, successes and challenges.
• The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, the emergency shelter and adult daycare aspects of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, and other federal nutrition assistance programs that have been historically understudied.
• Various topics to inform the next reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), such as feasibility to purchase healthy foods meeting dietary guidelines with SNAP benefits; a series of systematic reviews on food waste, scaling the TFP for different family sizes and types, and updated food price data; and studying alternative models to calculate the TFP.

In a bid to attain deeper insights into pressing issues that might hinder equal access and opportunities, the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) is currently utilizing cooperative agreements as catalysts for investigative purposes.

• Primarily, these studies are geared towards unraveling the barriers that could obstruct equitable access and inhibit the broadening of participation in child nutrition programs.
• Additionally, a dedicated focus is on probing the ongoing state and local initiatives channelled towards mitigating maternal morbidity and mortality through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. The overarching aim through these studies is to improve, amplify, and streamline efforts across different levels of nutrition and health programming.