Forage Expands Online Grocery TAM

Forage expands demand by turning SNAP recipients from offline only shoppers into online grocery customers that merchants could not previously reach. The product is not just another checkout button. It handles USDA approval, SKU level eligibility, split tender for non food items and fees, and PIN based checkout, which lets smaller grocers and delivery platforms open up a large pool of grocery spend without building a bespoke compliance team.

• The bottleneck is not consumer demand, it is implementation. Around 250,000 stores accepted EBT in person, but fewer than 100 merchants accepted it online when this interview was conducted. Instacart took about nine months to build online EBT, Walmart and Amazon took about 18 months, which shows why many merchants needed a specialist layer.
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• This matters even more in online grocery because basket economics are fragile. Farmstead argued that operators generally need baskets above $50 and thousands of daily orders to make delivery work. Adding SNAP eligible households can raise order density and warehouse utilization without changing the core fulfillment model.
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• The deeper pattern is restricted spend payments becoming infrastructure. In fintech, categories like EBT, HSA, and FSA are attractive because the funds are large but can only move through narrow, rule heavy payment rails. That makes compliance itself part of the product, and gives specialists like Forage room to win where general processors stay generic.
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The next step is that online grocery and delivery products will be designed with benefit payments in mind from day one. As more merchants treat EBT acceptance as core demand infrastructure, the winners will be the platforms that can combine compliant checkout, low fees, and broad delivery coverage into a default way for lower income households to buy groceries online.