Washington, D.C. – The National Grocers Association Foundation (NGAF) held the kickoff meeting for the POS Nutrition Incentive Workgroup yesterday. The group aims to establish core functionality required for efficient and accurate nutrition incentive POS solutions. Nutrition incentives allow grocers to provide extra food dollars, for which retailers are reimbursed, to low-income shoppers to buy more fruits and vegetables .
The POS Nutrition Incentive Workgroup is an outgrowth of the previously shared open letter to industry outlining the need for developing nutrition incentive POS solutions. NGAF has worked with the Nutrition Incentive Hub to gather 20 volunteers from the nutrition incentive community who will meet weekly over the next few months to reach consensus on the common functionality needed in POS systems to offer nutrition incentives.
NGAF has contracted with Peter Relich, an expert in electronic payments with 37 years of experience, to facilitate the workgroup. Relich has led multiple standards and consensus-building efforts over his career and was an essential part of the team that moved the industry from paper food stamps to Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT).
“This group is embarking on an exciting opportunity to streamline the development of POS technology for SNAP incentives and leave a lasting legacy for implementing these programs in grocery stores,” said Ted Mason, project director for the NGAF Technical Assistance Center which serves as the grocer resource for nutrition incentives. NGAF looks forward to sharing the developed functionality and reporting document created by this workgroup with POS developers in the future.”
About NGA Foundation
The NGA Foundation is the 501(c)3 nonprofit arm of the National Grocers Association. The Foundation provides independent retailers with tools to develop more effective recruiting programs, enhance retention efforts and bolster professional leadership development opportunities for employers. For more information, visit www.ngafoundation.org.
About the Nutrition Incentive Hub
The Nutrition Incentive Hub is a coalition of partners, created by the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program National Training, Technical Assistance, Evaluation and Information Center (GusNIP NTAE Center), that supports nutrition incentive projects, including SNAP incentives, and produce prescription projects. The GusNIP NTAE Center is led by the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition. In partnership with Fair Food Network, they assembled the Nutrition Incentive Hub, a coalition of evaluators, researchers, practitioners, and grocery and farmers market experts from across the country dedicated to strengthening and uniting the best thinking in the field to increase access to affordable, healthy food for those who need it most. The GusNIP NTAE Center is funded through a cooperative agreement and supported by Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program grant 2019-70030-30415/project accession 1020863 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Learn more at https://www.nutritionincentivehub.org.
