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With the looming threat of SNAP cuts amidst increased food costs and the threat of tariffs combined with a stagnated minimum wage, the health and well-being of the nation’s families and children are at risk.
Recently passed in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is set to make cuts to SNAP benefits and freeze the cost of the SNAP food market basket (i.e., Thrifty Food Plan), a list of foods and beverages used as the basis for calculating the monthly SNAP benefit amount. Freezing the market basket’s value means it won’t keep up with inflation, in turn reducing families’ purchasing power.
This project will replicate and expand Children’s HealthWatch’s prior work (2005, 2008, 2011) in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, which found gaps of more than $1,000 between what the maximum SNAP benefit was supposed to be able to buy and the actual cost of food. These findings underscored the inadequacy of the existing SNAP benefit and the need for increases—not cuts—to the value of the benefit to truly support a healthy diet for all. These prior analyses have been cited as helping to build momentum for the update to the Thrifty Food Plan that went into effect in 2021.
Students will work in supervised teams to track food availability and costs of items in the Thrifty Food Plan market basket in-person in four cities across the country (Boston-MA, Little Rock-AR, Minneapolis-MN, and Philadelphia-PA) at a variety of food store types (e.g. corner stores, mid-size grocery stores, large supermarkets) across low-income, high poverty neighborhoods. We will also check the market basket’s price in all 50 states and DC using online food retailers. Our team will then calculate the true cost of the market basket in the community, including documenting missing items. We will compare the real food costs with the official USDA reference cost as well as with the maximum SNAP benefit amount. Then we will calculate the gap between the real food cost and national and state minimum wage as well as simulate the impact of tariffs on food prices.
The Real Cost of a Healthy Diet project will provide real-world data to document the impact of high food costs on the budgets of families with children and to protect SNAP against harmful cuts, ensuring that families nationwide continue to have access to healthy foods. Findings from the report will be important for evidence-based advocacy working with grassroots, policy, and research partners, and of strong interest to grocers and policymakers.
