AWS Public Sector Blog

Enabling public-private collaborations to innovate on behalf of those facing food insecurity

Enabling public-private collaborations to innovate on behalf of those facing food insecurity

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), one out of every 10 households in the US is food insecure. For households led by single mothers, the rate is one in four. Barriers stand in the way of accessing resources; for example, many families lack transportation to get to a grocery store or food pantry. And standing in line at a food pantry can mean taking time off from work or finding childcare while the parent waits.

Reducing food insecurity and increasing access to healthy foods is a major priority for state and federal agencies. In 2022, the Biden Administration released a strategy to address hunger, nutrition, and health—but the federal government cannot make these transformative changes alone. Accelerating this work requires action and collaboration from state and local governments, the private sector, and more. To heed this call, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Access, and state and local agencies are teaming up to rethink how to make eating healthy simple, nutritious, and cost-effective.

Making healthy meal prep simpler for food insecure households with AWS and Amazon Fresh

Meal kit delivery services have revolutionized the way Americans shop and eat. These kits also present an option for bringing high-quality and nutritious meals to food insecure households. But some of these services can cost up to $15 a plate, and in the past, few could be paid for with nutrition assistance programs. Additionally, many current options only provide ingredients for one or two meals, meaning food goes to waste.

In 2017, Amazon was one of the first retailers to work with the USDA to build support for online utilization of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. In 2020, when the pandemic increased the need for grocery delivery, states began to quickly support online SNAP purchases. Today, 49 states and the District of Columbia permit grocers to accept SNAP purchases online.

With this new policy, multiple Amazon businesses worked with the Public Service Network (PSN) to innovate a new solution for delivering food to SNAP beneficiaries. This initiative became SnapExpress.org, a website built on AWS through which SNAP beneficiaries can choose pre-built meal kits, get connected to Amazon Fresh or another retailer for fulfillment, and have those ingredients delivered to their doorstep. The meal kits are nutritionist-approved and cost effective. To mitigate food waste and increase cost effectiveness, each recipe is connected to other recipes with similar ingredients. If a user selects a pasta dish, the system may also recommend a pizza recipe to make use of the left-over pasta sauce.

This initiative—born from the blending of responsive policy and innovative technology—helps reduce grocery planning and shopping time, stretch dollars to maximize meal servings, and gives food-insecure families a new way to access healthy, fresh, ready-to-make food by meeting them where they live.

“If you’ve ever bought all the ingredients for a single recipe, you know there is a lot of unused food that sits on the shelf for an indefinite period of time,” said PSN President Robert Gaudian. “The SNAP user cannot afford to have these dollars tied up with ingredients that are not being used immediately in healthy meals to help feed their families. That’s why SNAP Express recommends nutritionist designed meal kits that use 95% of all the ingredients in the recipes selected. In this way, we enable individuals to purchase healthy food for their families with the confidence that they can maximize meal servings and stay on their food budget.”

Developing a meal fulfillment pipeline for SNAP beneficiaries with AWS and Amazon Fresh

Other state and local organizations can develop a similar initiative for their communities. The following outlines a high-level architecture using AWS services to build a cost-effective website that SNAP beneficiaries can use to order meal kits and food deliveries via Amazon Fresh or other retailers with online ordering capabilities.

This example web application is built using serverless architecture, which is a common and cost-effective way of running web applications at scale to connect to an API. Agencies or community organizations can work directly with AWS to enable the API. Figure 1 outlines how to design a cost-effective website that SNAP beneficiaries can visit to order meal kits and food deliveries.

Figure 1. High-level architecture of serverless web application hosted on AWS.

Figure 1. High-level architecture of serverless web application hosted on AWS.

Figure 1 illustrates a serverless method for hosting a website that is intended for end users, with static files (.js,.css, images, and so on) being stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Amazon Route 53 provides highly available and scalable domain name system (DNS); domain name registration; and health-checking web services. Route 53 connects users’ web requests to other components of the solutions running on AWS.

By caching the content at the edge using Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network, along with Amazon S3 origins, organizations can reduce the cost of Amazon S3 access while bringing their content closer to the end user. With the help of the CloudFront integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall, organizations can protect the application against common web exploits and bots that can affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it simple to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. API developers can create APIs that access AWS or other web services, as well as data stored in the AWS Cloud. API Gateway can integrate with Amazon Cognito, which provides an identity store that scales to millions of users, supports social and enterprise identity federation, and offers advanced security features to protect consumers and organizations.

To fulfill web requests from users, API Gateway integrates with AWS Lambda. Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets organizations run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda calls the Amazon Fresh API when a user requests the recipe detail shopping page to browse the product offers and place an order. In order to store related user data, such as past orders and transaction logs, Lambda communicates with Amazon DynamoDB, which is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale, depending on the type of request.

Making healthy food more affordable with Amazon Access

Launched in October 2022, Amazon Access is a centralized home to explore programs, discounts, and features that make shopping on the Amazon online store simpler and more affordable for SNAP beneficiaries using their SNAP electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards. This includes Prime Access, Amazon Prime’s discounted membership program for qualifying government assistance recipients. The mission of the Amazon Access program is to improve food access, payment flexibility, and health and wellness.

Amazon Access is committed to making healthy food accessible by offering choice and affordability through online grocery shopping, food delivery, and physical locations, giving all customers convenience, time savings, and low prices. The Amazon Access team is working with government agencies, nonprofits, healthcare providers, employers and other organizations who wish to expand access to produce incentives and other grocery benefits.

Washington State Department of Health uses Amazon Access to extend healthy foods to residents

In November 2022, Amazon Access teamed up with the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) to launch the Washington State SNAP Produce Match which provides Washington state residents with more money to buy healthy foods like fresh produce. The Washington State SNAP Produce Match program allows Washington state residents who use SNAP and Pandemic EBT benefits to use SNAP Produce Match for Amazon Fresh online store purchases. When SNAP/EBT shoppers buy at least $10 worth of fruits and vegetables in the Amazon Fresh online store with their SNAP/EBT card, they receive a $10 SNAP Produce Match promotion that can be used towards future purchases of fruits and vegetables in the Amazon Fresh online store. Since the program launched in November 2022, there has been close to 90% coupon redemption rate with more than 13,000 coupons redeemed.

If your organization is interested in exploring opportunities to team up with Amazon Access to launch a healthy grocery benefit program, please contact the Amazon Access team via email at amazonaccess-partnerships@amazon.com

Conclusion

Public-private collaborations are essential to serving constituents where they are—right at their doorstep. Government agencies that administer and operate SNAP can enhance beneficiaries’ experience through private partnerships that make eating healthy simple and affordable. For more information on how to use the Amazon Fresh API for meeting beneficiaries where they live, work, and play, please contact aws-slg-foodinsecurity@amazon.com.

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Betsy Baker

Betsy Baker

Betsy Baker is the public health transformation leader for the state and local government team at Amazon Web Services (AWS), focusing on innovative use cases in public health and healthcare. In this role, she engages with public healthcare agencies across the US to invent new ways to leverage technology to improve the constituent experience in government social programs, such as public health, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and to be more prepared to respond to public emergencies and meeting constituents where they are. Prior to AWS, Ms. Baker was a director of client services at a mid-market healthcare analytics firm, where she curated an analytics solution for Medicaid agencies to identify top spend on beneficiaries and link to clinical data to influence program frameworks. Ms. Baker holds her Masters in Public Health from the University of Colorado with an emphasis in health systems management and policy.

Nancy Dalton

Nancy Dalton

Nancy Dalton is the head of community experience and customer marketing for Amazon Access within the Consumer North American Stores division. She and her team design and implement retail programs that expand access and lower the cost of convenience for underserved customer segments. In the face of Covid, her team drove the launch of Amazon’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) acceptance program, which enables SNAP recipients the opportunity to purchase groceries online using their electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card. This product suite has now expanded to offer nutrition incentives, EBT-exclusive discounts, Amazon Layaway, and Prime Access under the Amazon Access Brand. Most recently, her team launched the Community Access program with the goal of giving residents living in high priority food areas more options to find affordable, quality, and diverse groceries. The program engages community-based organizations to amplify their anti-hunger efforts and raise awareness about the vast array of services that Amazon offers in these communities.

Pramod Halapeti

Pramod Halapeti

Pramod Halapeti is a solution architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he provides support for customers in the health and human services industry. In this capacity, he assists clients in resolving the business challenges they face and is extremely enthusiastic about serverless technologies. Outside of his professional life, he enjoys going on road trips with his family and exploring national parks.

Robert (Bob) Gaudian

Robert (Bob) Gaudian

Robert Gaudian is a public relations, marketing, and media professional who has been a pioneer in the development of innovative new communications channels for the distribution of social marketing campaigns for more than 30 years. Mr. Gaudian is currently the senior program director for numerous nonprofit and state and federal government integrated media outreach campaigns. He is the team lead for overall campaign guidance and strategy as well as oversees the quality assurance process for Public Service Network (PSN). Mr. Gaudian is a proven entrepreneur who developed ground-breaking web-based systems for licensing and distributing video, audio, and images via the Internet for companies including UPI, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Clear Channel Communications (iHeart Media), and Granada Television in the UK. Mr. Gaudian is also an award-winning video and audio producer and distributor who started his broadcast career in public broadcasting with National Public Radio (NPR). While at NPR, he was instrumental in the launch of one of the first shared-use satellite broadcast distribution initiatives in the industry. Mr. Gaudian received a Bachelor of Business Management from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA.