PENSACOLA, Fla. — Starting Monday, SNAP recipients will see new limits on what their benefits can buy.
Florida is joining the list of states restricting products like candy and soda.
WEAR News stopped by a grocery store to see how it prepared for the changes.
One grocery store owner says that they started preparing two months before the new rules took effect– because it was up to the store to determine which products no longer made the cut under the new guidelines.
Soda, many energy drinks, candy, and ultra-processed desserts are officially no longer covered under the SNAP program.
Mark Fisher, owner of Grocery Advantage, says stores had to manually review thousands of products.
“There’s a little education that has to go on with us as we were looking, reading labels,” Fisher said. “We’re reading the Little Debbie labels and the hostess labels and seeing which ones could fit and which ones couldn’t.”
Fisher says some of the guidelines were vague.
“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.”
Between 7,000 and 8,000 items had to be removed from the approved list in the system.
But Fisher does not expect a ton of confusion at the cash register.
“The people at SNAP recipients pretty much understand what’s going on,” Fisher said. “Now there’ll be some fine tuning with cookie products and individual things that have not been actually spelled out to them.”
However, he does anticipate a change in customer shopping habits.
“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,” Fisher said. “That’s what we’re trying to get to as healthy alternatives.”
When the changes were first announced, WEAR News spoke to a few customers; the reactions were mixed on the new rules.
“I would love to think that they would benefit from more healthy guidelines, but the minute you let the public decide what to take away from the poor, they’ll take away everything,” UWF retired professor Louise Tolbert said. “That is not what I want to see happen.”
“I think that it’s a good thing for the health of the people that are on SNAP,” taxpayer Quint Gaskill said. “I know that good food is sometimes expensive, but if you spend your money correctly and make a decent meal, you can have a healthy meal for a good price.”
Fisher says he has also prepared his staff to help any customers out that have to alter their grocery list.