Forage split tender EBT checkout
Justin Intal, CEO of Forage, on helping online grocery platforms process EBT
Split tender is the product wedge that turns EBT acceptance from a compliance checkbox into a usable checkout. In online grocery, a basket often mixes eligible food with ineligible fees, taxes, or household goods, so one payment method is not enough. Forage solved the hard part inside Shopify by letting EBT cover approved SKUs while a card pays the rest, inside a USDA approved flow that also includes PIN entry and balance verification.
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This is why online approval is much harder than in store approval. A physical convenience store can let a cashier separate items at the register. Online, the software has to identify eligibility at the SKU level, route each portion to the right payment rail, and document the checkout logic in the merchant’s approval materials.
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The feature is also a distribution unlock for platforms. Instacart needed about nine months and a large internal team to become compliant, while Amazon and Walmart took about 18 months. Forage packaged that work into software and templates, including automated business requirement documents, so smaller grocers and Shopify merchants could launch without building a payments and compliance team from scratch.
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The broader implication is that EBT processing behaves less like standard card acceptance and more like regulated vertical software. Forage only charges on EBT transactions, and merchants often keep their normal card processor for the second payment. That makes split tender the connective tissue between government benefits rails and mainstream commerce rails, which is why later merchants like Weee! used Forage to add SNAP online.
Going forward, the companies that win online grocery will be the ones that make mixed baskets feel invisible at checkout. As more grocers, specialty food apps, and delivery platforms add SNAP, the advantage will shift to processors that can combine eligibility logic, fraud controls, and dual payment orchestration into one reliable integration.