Grocery Prices and the Use of Food Assistance: Evidence from New York's Southern Tier

This paper studies how grocery price fluctuations affect the use of public and private food assistance in a six-county region of New York State. Using linked household-level administrative records on SNAP benefits receipt and redemption activity and on food pantry visits, merged with monthly grocery price indices we construct from scanner data from food retailers in the region from January 2019 to June 2021, we study how changes in overall and category-specific food prices affect the use of SNAP benefits and food pantries. Higher local grocery prices increase the probability of visiting a food pantry and of SNAP participation, and cause both more frequent pantry visits and faster within-month exhaustion of SNAP benefits. The implied changes in any single household’s behavior are small in absolute terms, however, suggesting that short-run grocery price fluctuations affect food assistance use in economically sensible directions but do not, on their own, drive meaningful food assistance use change at the household level. Food category-specific price estimates show little systematic relationship between pantry use and price changes across food groups, while faster SNAP exhaustion is most strongly associated with price increases in dairy, miscellaneous foods, and protein foods.