Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1017/S1368980025100931

Publication Title

Public Health Nutrition

Volume

28

Issue

1

Pages

e147

Abstract

Objective:

To examine how the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) online food benefit ordering could influence WIC benefit redemptions.

Design:

A cross-sectional study. We compare the average redemption rates between online ordering early adopters and non-adopters among WIC customers before and after implementing WIC online ordering. A propensity score-weighted difference-in-difference model was used to estimate the coefficients.

Setting:

The Oklahoma WIC programme and a grocery store chain in Oklahoma.

Participants:

12743 Oklahoma WIC households that had redeemed their food benefits at the grocery store chain in 2020.

Results:

WIC online ordering significantly positively affected redemption rates for eight of the fifteen food categories. For example, the difference-in-difference coefficients (P–values) of these food categories were cheese or tofu (0·077, < 0·01), yogurt (0·092, < 0·01), whole milk (0·082, 0·022), low-fat milk (0·060, < 0·01), eggs (0·049, 0·033), breakfast cereal (0·085, < 0·01) and infant formula (0·073, 0·039). Two food categories with significantly negative difference-in-difference coefficients had relatively lower redemption rates overall: canned fish (Coefficient = –0·209, P < 0·01) and infant cereal (Coefficient = –0·138, P = 0·015). There were no significant changes in the redemption of fruits and vegetables (Coefficient = 0·031, P = 0·121).

Conclusion:

Adopting WIC online ordering was positively associated with benefit redemption rates among most food benefit categories. Our findings provide preliminary but important evidence regarding online food benefit redemption among low-income consumers.

Rights

© The Authors, 2025.

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

ORCID

0000-0002-7203-2664 (Tang)

Original Publication Citation

Zhang, J., Tang, C., Park, K., & Zhang, Q. (2025). The association between food benefit online ordering and redemptions: evidence from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Public Health Nutrition, 28(1), Article e147. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980025100931

Download

Share

COinS