On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved the Fiscal Year 2017 Agriculture Appropriations bill. An amendment was included in the bill that would prohibit the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) from using any of its funds to enact regulations that would go much further in changing the retailer SNAP participation requirements than Congress intended in the statutory requirements of the 2014 Farm Bill.

The SNAP proposed rule would greatly extend the Congressional intent in the Farm Bill in that in order for retailers to participate in the SNAP program, "multiple ingredient" items (cold pizza) would not be counted in any staple food category and would not count toward meeting a retailer's "depth of stock" requirements. Currently, multiple ingredient foods can be counted under the category of the main ingredient. The proposal would require that retailers always have six different units of any food item that are in the store and are counted under the four mandated categories (requiring seven different options in each category) of eligibility for SNAP participation, i.e. 7x4=28, 28x6=168. Stores would be required to publicly display 168 units of single-ingredient food items at all times. FNS estimates that the costs for stocking additional items would be $140 on average. Also the FNS proposes that stores that do not have 85 percent or more of their "total food sales" in items that are not cooked or heated on site, before or after purchase, that those stores would be ineligible for the program.

PMAA is working with the Convenience Store Committee and will submit comments on the proposed rule by the May 18 deadline. In addition, if you would like to submit your own comments, PMAA encourages you to use this template (which is a WORD file that can be personally edited) and then go to this link to comment.

Further, in the coming weeks, we will provide directions on reaching out to Members of Congress and the Senate to seek intervention of the FNS proposed regulatory over-reach.