Thousands of families will be able to shop for free fresh fruit and vegetables, after a Silicon Valley lawmaker obtained needed funding.
Assemblymember Alex Lee has secured $10 million to restart the CalFresh Fruit and Vegetable Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) Pilot Project. The program, which launched February 2023, allows people with EBT cards to receive instant rebates up to $60 a month when buying fruit and vegetables at select grocery stores. The program was so popular it ran out of money in April. Ninety-three stores participated in the pilot statewide, including five in Santa Clara County.
“There’s nothing more quintessential and yet underrated in peoples’ lives than fresh, healthy, nutritious food,” Lee, whose district covers Fremont, Newark, Sunol, Milpitas and parts of San Jose, told San José Spotlight. “While there are many big issues out there, like housing insecurity and poverty, there needs to be more attention to just making sure people are well fed. This is a program that has already proven to work really well. That’s why it was so important to bring this program back.”
From fall 2023 to April 2024, 7,200 Santa Clara County households participated in the program, receiving a total of $460,000 additional dollars for their EBT cards. Overall, the program served 93,000 households statewide, providing a total of $10.5 million in rebates.
This program is essential for the low-income communities that Arteaga’s Food Center serves in the county, owner Lupe Lopez said.
Arteaga’s Food Center has four participating locations in the county: three in San Jose and one in Gilroy. Customers were gutted when the program stopped running, and they told Lopez they had to choose between buying food and putting gas in their car.
“It’s probably one of the most valuable programs because we live in a very expensive community,” Lopez told San José Spotlight. “So by having that extra money in there, this really is the difference of them having (enough) to eat or not having food on the table.”
The region is suffering from widespread food insecurity, with participation in CalFresh at its highest level in a decade. More than 130,000 Santa Clara County residents are receiving food stamps, almost double what it was in 2019.
People enrolled in CalFresh often also get groceries at food banks, with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley serving approximately 500,000 people a month — the same as during the height of the pandemic. Prior to that, the food bank served 250,000 people every month through food distributions and grocery programs.
Rachel Monaco, senior manager of policy and advocacy for Second Harvest, said programs like CalFresh and the EBT pilot are important because they help fill an important nutritional gap for families.
“We really have not seen the level of demand for food support decline very much at all since the onset of the pandemic,” Monaco told San José Spotlight. “Families are just really struggling with the really high cost of groceries and food here in our region.”
Lopez said her customers are thankful the pilot program is running again, but the $10 million is expected to run out in a couple of months.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Lee’s Assembly Bill 3229 this year to evaluate the pilot program and see if it can be made permanent. The next step requires the California Department of Social Services, the agency overseeing the program, to submit a report to the state Legislature by July 1 and include the necessary steps to make it permanent.
“Technologically and user interface-wise, everything works now,” Lee said. “That’s what the pilot was about, and now it’s (about) how to figure out how to scale it out statewide.”
Eli Zigas, executive director from nonprofit Fullwell, which helped the state administer the program in Northern California, said he’d like to see it expand to larger grocery stores in the future. Fullwell is a Bay Area-based nonprofit that creates policies to tackle food insecurity in the state.
“We absolutely want to see it not just extended to be a full-year program, but also expand it so it can reach more people and help more people,” Zigas told San José Spotlight.
Zigas said Safeway has expressed interest in joining the program. To do so, the program needs to secure more funding.
“What we know from earlier research of similar programs is that it works,” Zigas said. “When people have more money to buy fruits and vegetables, they do buy more fruits and vegetables … and that stimulates the agricultural economy.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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